Helen Vendler

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Ramona Koval: Helen Vendler is regarded far and wide as the pre-eminent critic of poetry writing in America today. She's written many, many books but also she's written in The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. Readers of those journals would have read her essays and reviews of poetry in which she's able to convey her love and understanding of the depths of this art in accessible language.

Last time we spoke it was about two years ago, we were talking about her book Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and the Lyric Form where she returned to the poet she encountered when she was first writing about poetry.

This time she joins us to talk about Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill in which she looks at the ways in which five great American poets have written about facing death in a time when there is not the old recourse to traditional religious ideas of afterlife and heavens of various kinds.

Helen Vendler is the A Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. And she joins us now from Boston. Welcome to The Book Show again Helen Vendler .

Helen Vendler: Thank you, Ramona, it's nice to talk to you again.

Ramona Koval: Yes, it's good to be speaking with you again. Let's begin, as you do in your book, by defining this idea of a last look. What is it?

Helen Vendler: In Ireland there's a custom called taking the last look in which on your deathbed you get up and once again walk the boundaries of your terrain, and having re-surveyed the place you've lived and thought about the events you lived through in it, you can then take to your bed and die. And it seemed to me that that kind of overlook or comprehensive look at what life has amounted to is what poets who know their death is coming very soon, if not imminently, can write...in their last books they can write about taking their last looks.

Ramona Koval: So how did you make the choices to feature these five poets and not others? What was the organising criteria for the book?

Helen Vendler: First of all I decided that it would be about modern American poets who had died. This was being presented to a national American audience at the national gallery. And these are poets I've written about off and on before, and I was interested in how they wound down their own expressions of what living felt like and what dying felt like, or would feel like.

Ramona Koval: So did they have to be aware that these were possibly their final thoughts on the matter?

Helen Vendler: It's different in each case. James Merrill had been dying for ten years of AIDS and had become unutterably frail and knew that it was only a matter of time before he actually died, and he did die a month after his collected poems came out. In fact this poem that I treat called 'Christmas Tree' actually came too late to be included in the collected poems. It may be his last poem.

The others...Stevens died within a year of having written his last book called The Rock, there wasn't time to bring it out as a separate volume even, it was folded into his collected poems. Elizabeth Bishop in many of her letters feels that she will die very soon, she'd had a number of difficult illnesses, lifelong asthma and internal bleeding more recently, bad anaemia and so on, so she forecasts her death in the letters of her last couple of years. And indeed this was her last book, Geography III.

In the case of Lowell, he was sure he was going to die at 60 because both of his parents had died at 60, and indeed he did die at 60, and so the last book has many episodes of farewell in it and in fact it ends with a poem called 'Epilogue' which is the formal closing of his poetic life.

And Plath had been facing death of course since she was eight, so that she...as I say in the book, she was always a posthumous person since her father died. 'The day you died,' she says in 'Electra on Azalea Path', 'I went into the dirt.' And in fact she felt that she had in fact caused her inner death by his own willed death.

Ramona Koval: And how strange that she did the same thing to her own children.

Helen Vendler: Yes, unfortunately it's a terrible familial depression. Frieda has escaped but I was very sad to hear about the death of Nicholas.

Ramona Koval: Did the poets have to have turned away from religious affiliations? Did they have to not be looking heavenwards?

Helen Vendler: Yes, it seemed to me that that was the new cultural task that was being set for modern poetry, that they could no longer rely on the structures and images of poetry that included the idea of an afterlife, and what do you make of your life when you think it's going to end and you're going to be extinct? And that needs a different set of images, a different set of tones. Yo can't have the tone of expectation, you can't have the tone of rejoicing about a future life to come. Of course future follows poets and philosophers, they're always ahead of their own culture. But to repudiate the terms of Christian elegy and think about secular elegy and self elegy seems to me one of the cultural tasks that these poets took on.

Ramona Koval: Do you think poets write differently about death when they're not facing it themselves?

Helen Vendler: I think we all think and feel differently about it at different ages. Hazlitt said 'no young man believes he will ever die' and that's probably pretty true. And I think it usually comes into people's focus very strongly on either of two occasions; either their parents die or one or the other parent dies, and/or a close friend of their own age dies, so that they're forced into thinking about what life feels now. Seamus Heaney when his parents died wrote a poem in which he said he said it felt as though the roof had been blown off and until then he had been under the roof. And I remember my teacher Rosemond Tuve saying something I didn't understand at all, she was in her 50s and her mother died, I was in my 30s, and she said, 'You know, when a parent dies, no matter what age you are yourself, you still become an orphan.' And I just couldn't quite imagine that then, but she was imagining it. So I think yes, attitudes do change over time.

Ramona Koval: Did you have the idea for this book when you noticed a commonality amongst poets taking the last look?

Helen Vendler: No, I saw a couple of poems that were extraordinary in the stylistic means they felt they had to adopt when looking at the imminent failure of the body but the ever bright vivacity of the spirit. And it seems to me you can write a single poem about either of those, 'my body is tottering', or the other poem rejoicing that you are still as alive as ever in your spirit, but it's very hard to put the tones appropriate to each of those feelings into a single poem or to devise a stylistic way of enacting both those tones, enacting the condition of the body and spirit at that interface. So I was interested first by a poem by Stevens and secondly by James Merrill's 'Christmas Tree'. Then I went on to look at the last books of others and was surprised to find in them the same sort of peculiar vision, where hope and despair, says Coleridge, meet on the porch of death.

Ramona Koval: You've called this the late binocular style, and let's take one example and look at James Merrill's poem 'Christmas Tree'. But first...you've told us he was dying for about ten years, wasn't he, he had AIDS...

Helen Vendler: Well, it was in the days before there were medicines for AIDS, so when you got the diagnosis in that time it was a fatal diagnosis.

Ramona Koval: So can you read 'Christmas Tree' for us?

Helen Vendler: Yes, could I explain something first? He mentions Milagros as among the ornaments on the Christmas tree. Milagros are little ex-votos made of silver that people in Mexico hang up at altars so that if you were cured of blindness you'd hold up a little silver semi-sculpture of two eyes, or you would hang up a crutch or you would hang up a heart if you had been cured of a heart condition. So they're symbolic little, as he calls them, 'software in silver'.

And the other thing that is striking about this poem is it's a shaped poem, like poems going all the way back to the Greeks, the shape of the lyre or the shape of an egg. This poem has a flush left margin, and when you look at the whole poem on the page, you'll see the poem on its right side as you go down...the left side is straight and on the right side it makes the picture of a Christmas tree, like a child's picture; out, in, out, in, out in, then it ends with a trunk and then a pot of whatever its standing in at the bottom.

When you look at it and see the shape of the Christmas tree and see that it's called 'Christmas Tree' you realise that the left half is missing and you of course realise then that since the Christmas tree is already dead, it's already been cut down, its life is over even though its needles are still green and it looks alive, that what is the missing left half is, you might say, its ghost.

And it's a very beautiful poem because as you read each of the lines you see the missing line that would fill it out on the left-hand side, so it's as though the ghost is speaking along with the posthumous tree and the poem is spoken by the tree. It has a sort of prelude about the imminent death, it has a middle in which the tree describes itself all wreathed in ornaments, and the it has a kind of coda which comes back to the bitterness of the beginning and then goes back to the joy of the adornment of the middle. So it's very nicely shaped with the prelude, the main self-description and then the coda. Here it is:

To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colours flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.
Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. The angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children's names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy's hands meeting
About my spine. The mother's voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love lit,
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.

Ramona Koval: So you look at that poem as the meeting place between life and death or in fact the fork in the road, is that what the binocular style is?

Helen Vendler: I think it's not so much a fork in the road but two coexisting things lying upon each other like a palimpsest. Underneath there is the thin tree needles and bone and then on top of it, you might say, is the adorned tree, beautiful, warm, lit, so that the two are present at the same time.

Ramona Koval: You mentioned Sylvia Plath...and of course she tried to kill herself several times and she succeeded at 30, and you say she practiced taking the last view from the time that she started to write, that she was always a posthumous writer but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style. So she did acquire that style in the end.

Helen Vendler: I think so, yes. She wrote many poems in the voice of the outraged eight-year-old, we might say, 'Daddy' being the best known of those where she even addresses her father by the familiar German du, and goes back to childhood in her rage at him, for he allowed himself to die of sepsis from gangrene, convinced that he had cancer, and he didn't, he could have been saved instantly, he merely had diabetes, but he wouldn't go to the doctor and eventually he died. She felt as though it was a horrible judgment on his feeling for her that he wouldn't stay alive for his children, herself and her brother Warren.

So she began writing in various ways about the rage which then had to be somehow contained in form. She writes very rigid sonnets when she's an undergraduate at Smith about cracking skulls in half with your hands, but it all has to fit into a perfect sonnet form. And she also writes self-denigrating poems like one, again, in her undergraduate work, called 'Female Author' in which she talks about how the world sees the female author. But then as she got older and tried to find the style that would be appropriate for the person she was, she veered between a kind of conventional lyric and these wild raging rants like 'Lady Lazarus' or 'Daddy'.

Then finally she saw that less was more and that an adult voice could look at the child's experiences with an adult tone rather than taking on the outraged tone of the child. So in one of her real turning points she wrote a poem called 'The Courage of Shutting Up'. She meant 'no more rants', and she began to write those very beautiful poems that appeared in Ariel and some of which came out posthumously.

Ramona Koval: Helen, I was just going to say, many of these writers were in states of extremis, and I don't mean just at the end of their lives; they had mental illnesses, they were alcoholics, they were depressed. Does that colour the theory at all?

Helen Vendler: Well, of course one answer is 'Who isn't?' That is, if you take the general population there is always going to be some people who are mentally ill, some people who are alcoholics and some people who are depressed. So it's not surprising that those qualities should turn up in any subsection of people.

Ramona Koval: But I'd say nearly 100% of these writers would be under that rubric, I think.

Helen Vendler: But other people's lives are not scrutinised to that extent. Probably if you went and looked at train conductors or something you could find a lot of them who had very peculiar personalities and actions but they wouldn't have been written up, so to speak. But there is perhaps, as Wordsworth said, a creation between the extremes of emotion to which the poet is receptive and the stress that that puts on the self. Wordsworth says in Resolution and Independence, 'we poets in our youth begin in gladness, but therefore come in the end despondency and madness'.

Ramona Koval: Do you think that they were aware of the binocular view, or is that just the job of the critic to point that out?

Helen Vendler: It's the usual question; but did they intend all that? But it's the same question that you can ask about composers. You don't ask, 'Did he intend a diminished seventh at that point in the piece?' And the answer is intention is not like that, it is a global thing, it's a holistic thing that thinks up a creation and then does it until the words or the music match the contour in the creator's mind. It's something that clicks; yes, that sounds right. And they can often try several things before it sounds right. Beethoven tried several four-beat melodies for the Ode to Joy before he landed on the one he ended up using in the Ninth. So that it's a constant flow between what is being written and how it is being revised and what is being written again, how it is being revised. And so I think they go by the click that says 'yes, that sounds right', but that click has been built up from an enormous repertoire of the verbal and the rhythmic and the generic. They have so much of the past poetry in their heads that their mind produces what's needed at the given moment.

Ramona Koval: Thank you so much for speaking with us again and making those things clear. It's good to speak to you again on The Book Show.

Helen Vendler: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Helen Vendler's book is called Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, and it's published by Princeton University Press.

Publications

Title: Last Looks, Last Books

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Princeton University Press