Lindsay, I was hoping that someone who had studied with Helen Vendler would write a tribute to her. Thanks for stepping up. I have put off reading her last essay -- an analysis of Whitman's "The Artilleryman's Vision" -- because I know how bereft I will feel when I finish it. Instead, I looked back at her commentary on Wallace Stevens's elegy for George Santayana, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome." "At the moment of death," Vendler wrote, "it is Santayana's lifelong creation, his edifice of thought, that becomes, in Stevens's view, a final architecture of 'total grandeur at the end.'"
If you had access to your books, I wonder which examples you would choose of "the compassion in which almost all of her readings of poems are grounded." Maybe I can guess at one of them. In her chapter on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," she wrote: "Like Ruth, he has emerged into a strange land: his exile was to leave the mythological realm of Flora and old Pan, of spring and budding, and accede to the lapses of time -- for him usually symbolized by the passage from budding to being full-blown, and from the season of flowers to the season of fruit or corn. 'The very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market: So, why should I be delicate' (Letters, II, 129). The sad heart of Keats, sick for his proper home in leafy luxury, stood in tears amid the alien corn of his brother's reaping."
Lindsay, I was hoping that someone who had studied with Helen Vendler would write a tribute to her. Thanks for stepping up. I have put off reading her last essay -- an analysis of Whitman's "The Artilleryman's Vision" -- because I know how bereft I will feel when I finish it. Instead, I looked back at her commentary on Wallace Stevens's elegy for George Santayana, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome." "At the moment of death," Vendler wrote, "it is Santayana's lifelong creation, his edifice of thought, that becomes, in Stevens's view, a final architecture of 'total grandeur at the end.'"
If you had access to your books, I wonder which examples you would choose of "the compassion in which almost all of her readings of poems are grounded." Maybe I can guess at one of them. In her chapter on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," she wrote: "Like Ruth, he has emerged into a strange land: his exile was to leave the mythological realm of Flora and old Pan, of spring and budding, and accede to the lapses of time -- for him usually symbolized by the passage from budding to being full-blown, and from the season of flowers to the season of fruit or corn. 'The very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market: So, why should I be delicate' (Letters, II, 129). The sad heart of Keats, sick for his proper home in leafy luxury, stood in tears amid the alien corn of his brother's reaping."