Helen Vendler quotes

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

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

Helen Vendler

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.

Helen Vendler

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

Helen Vendler

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

Helen Vendler

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

Helen Vendler

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.

Helen Vendler

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.

Helen Vendler