Quotes from Helen Vendler

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them .... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

The war in the poem between the warmth of Keatsian language and the chill of metaphysical analysis means that Stevens has not achieved a style that can embrace both the physical pine and the metaphysical pine.

Long Years apart - can make no Breach a second cannot fill - The absence of the Witch does not Invalidate the spell -

what delights the poet is 'unintelligibility' ...(where) language doesn't sound like anything anyone could possibly say in 'real life' or in 'real philosophy.

To create the new we must first de-create the old; and the reality of decreation (as Stevens called it, borrowing the word from Simone Weil) is as strong as the reality of creation.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.