Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
Helen Vendler
“Vendler sparkles.”
—Irvin Ehrenpreis, New York Review of Books
America’s foremost critic savors the poetry that made—and remade—our twentieth-century canon.
The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as “an extremely good reader—one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.” By this measure, Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic, she is an evangelist for poetic truth, guiding readers along the tracks of her own authoritative readings to disclose the interplay of form, feeling, and perception that defines each poet’s idiosyncratic vision of the world.
A compilation of essays and reviews written for the New York Times Book Review and other outlets, Part of Nature, Part of Us is a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined midcentury American poetry. The work collected here, originally published in the late 1960s and 1970s, marks the first time that canonical modern poets like T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath could be judged from a critical distance. Reviewing more recent poets—including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich—Vendler also gives readers a chance to share in the “freshness of [her] first impressions.” Throughout, she is unforgiving but never unfair. She exults those who, like Lowell, show an essential fidelity to perception, who “say what happened” without stumbling into a mass of clichés. But she is unsparing with those who come to distrust their own emotions and retreat into clinical facticity, like the later Moore.
Unflinching, engrossing, and frequently poetic in its own right, Part of Nature, Part of Us confirms Vendler’s unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets’ value as thinkers, as artists, and, finally, as humans.
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About Helen Vendler
Reviews for Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
Irvin Ehrenpreis
New York Review of Books
Helen Vendler puts herself entirely at the service of the poets she is talking about. Although she writes too well to be invisible, she does not compete or pontificate either… What she does is to offer the poetry to you.
Anatole Broyard
New York Times
Part of Nature, Part of Us is a book that asks to be reread until it is completely possessed—like a poem. It is significant not only for what Helen Vendler finds in poetry, but for what she brings to it; what she sees in what she reads and what she shows to us is a function of who she is. In all that she writes it is manifest that Helen Vendler reads new poems with knowledge and intelligence and passion and wit and warmth; she comes out to greet them. Because of that, she herself becomes a writer to whom one can return for a sense of life.
Richard Dyer
Boston Globe
Helen Vendler is the best poetry reviewer in America. Her virtues are a rigorous attending to verbal structure and texture; the ability to quote appositely and economically; a sure though not a too-exclusive taste; above all, the ability to do the poem one better by putting into words the relevant responses we might have had if we’d been smarter and more feeling… In her brilliant fusion of reviewing and criticism [she] is the legitimate successor to P. R. Blackmur and Randall Jarrell.
William H. Pritchard
New Republic
Vendler writes in a manner that is calculated to satisfy...Her style is lively, entertaining and humane, with the boldness in generalization, the exactness of metaphor, the conciseness in summing up a poet and the deadly accuracy in locating the defects, that delight both the common reader and the expert...It is a relief to find a critic who conceives of her work as having a definite and humane purpose...introducing and explaining poets to readers who might otherwise find them difficult, intimidating or unsympathetic.
Monroe K. Spears
Washington Post