Word: vendler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard faculty--such as Professor of English Peter Sacks and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Henri Cole--and poets living in the Boston area, like Derek Walcott, Frank Bidart and new Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Harvard also boasts such nationally acclaimed critics as Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler and Fredric Wertham professor Barbara Johnson. And the university's Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position often held by practicing poets, is presently occupied by recent Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney...
...important to keep in mind that we haven't done a very good job in secondary institutions--nor in college, as far as I can tell--of teaching basic elements of the technical aspects of poetry," Engell says. Vendler agrees, adding that the decline of Anglophilia in America after the World Wars led to the decrease of English poetry in textbooks--leaving an educational "poetry gap" which has not yet been adequately filled up with the work of the great American poets. "[That] seems to me deplorable," she says. "I think there should be a sustained effort to present Americans...
...Vendler also says that the historical restriction of literature to an educated upper class continues to linger to this day, leading to the perception that poetry is an elitist art form. And Engell suggests that the cultural milieu of the past few decades may have been more heavily "saturated with cinema and politics" than with literature of any kind, leaving even less room for poetry...
...Vendler feels that poetry serves a valuable function in the way it allows people to express and explore their private existence. "Fiction and drama--which students see more of, even on television or at the movies--have to do with a person's life in society: You usually have to have two people to make a drama, and a novel tends to have a wide social canvas...[But] the only place where you hear what the soul says to itself when it's alone is poetry...
...Vendler also speaks of the "patterning instinct" innate in human beings, which, she says, is ramified in many art forms--visual and musical as well as verbal. She comments that many mathematics students also take great pleasure in highly patterned musical forms, and that, when they turn to poetry, they often find it there as well, "Poetry is the most concise and highest form of verbal patterning that we do," she says...