Colin Burrow: Good Weird or Bad Weird

Colin Burrow

What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing a work of literary criticism, as they happily did in the 1970s and 1980s. Even literary biography, literary criticism’s previously marketable stepsister, no longer brings a gleam to a publisher’s eye. The grassroots of the subject are also suffering badly. Since 2000 the number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third, to around 36,000, with an even higher drop among male students.

The reasons for this are easy to see but hard to do much about. Reading is harder work than scrolling or gaming. Many literary critics now write unreadable books for colleagues who will never look at them, and some have failed in the basic requirement to explain and enthuse and project a sense of purpose. A-level courses have become less interesting over the last two decades as rival exam boards compete for customers and as teachers opt to teach shorter and simpler texts in order to get better results and rise up the league tables. Combine all this with increasingly instrumentalised conceptions of what education is for, spice it up with reasonable fears among the young that if they are ever to own a flat they need to be able to see an obvious return for the hideous levels of debt that a university education now imposes on all but the richest and luckiest, and you have a recipe for a big shift from literature to business studies, with about 45,000 students at A-level, up from about 30,000 in 2005.

Many recent responses to ‘What’s the point of literary criticism?’ have implicitly accepted that a subject can justify people studying it only if it will make them money or get them a job. Studying English literature gives you ‘transferable skills’. It encourages empathy and understanding of other people and a willingness to make balanced analytical judgments, which the few remaining employers out there who are not horrible will or might or should value. Then there are neurological (or sometimes pop-neuro) justifications: reading poems lights up bits of your brain that other reading can’t reach, and the more bits of your brain that aren’t lost in an AI-induced fog the better. Read English! Light up your grey matter!

Some of those arguments are not simply venal. And some are OK, so far as they go. They help explain why people who have read English can end up as CEOs of big companies or as headteachers. There’s now even a British prime minister who read English and got the job largely because he seems better at talking to people than his lawyer predecessor. English graduates can also do some of the things that make life worth living: write TV dramas, act, do stand-up, sing, make films or help Brian Eno make music, to list just a few of my former students’ activities. But often the terms on which the subject is defended (which broadly speaking boil down to ‘don’t worry, it will get you a job’) concede so much to the dingy gods of the marketplace that they don’t capture the point, the real reason someone might want to study the subject, let alone evoke the kinds of pleasure that might come from doing it well.

So what are those pleasures? What is the point? The core act of literary criticism sounds simple. It is sitting down with a bit of writing and thinking about it. Then there should be a head-exploding moment of making connections between its different bits and perhaps bits of one’s own experience or stuff that’s happening in the world now or which was happening in the world around the person who wrote it. Sometimes the thing you’re reading will seem alien or baffling to start with. But the key thing to remember is that it once mattered to someone enough to make them shape it and write it down, so there has to be something there, even if finally you decide it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did to the person who wrote it, or that it doesn’t really work. You might think about the way it manages to create a particular effect and you might learn how to write from thinking about the way it’s done (are there tricks, bits of compositional magic you can learn from?), or you might just feel a shiver at understanding something you never thought could be understood. Sometimes you get a sense of seeing someone else’s world, or a world that you didn’t think was there. And once you have worked out a way of understanding the poem or the novel or the play then you have to convey it to someone else. A good critic is a kind of lightning conductor who picks out the energy in what they read and passes it on to others. When I was a teenager I coached the unliterary but perfectly clever younger brother of a friend whose destiny was to become an engineer and whose main ambition (which he has now achieved) was to own six motorbikes. He would say of every poem I put in front of him that it was ‘weird’. Well, that was a start. What made it weird? Was it a good kind of weird or a bad kind of weird?

I would have liked back then to have had a copy of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem, which is a perfect book to give to someone who doesn’t really see the point of poems or of literary criticism. Vendler spent a lifetime – which ended in April 2024 – writing about lyric poetry. She believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others. This posthumous collection of essays discusses lyric poems from John Donne to Ocean Vuong. Most of the pieces begin by quoting an entire poem, which is then set up against a big concept (William Cowper’s poem on the death of one of his pet hares is discussed under the aspect of ‘charm’), so you get the idea that reading poems isn’t just about counting syllables or tum-tumming along in your head, but can be a kind of thinking, or a way of bringing abstractions to life and testing them against experience. As Vendler’s critical readings unfold, you often want to turn back to the poem, because she will always notice things you have missed, so the book is a very good advertisement for the old technology of the codex: to do reading as rethinking it helps to keep a finger on the page with the poem on it.

Several essays open with autobiographical flourishes which describe the way Vendler first encountered a poem, sometimes finding herself initially mystified by it. Those bits of autobiography make it clear that this critic is a human being who makes mistakes, changes her mind, had a difficult adolescence (she was brought up in a devout Catholic family), had a child she raised largely on her own, and that poems can give a shape to and a way of thinking about all those experiences and more. She explains that she had ‘no idea what to make of’ Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ when she read it in her twenties. She then asks ‘what was the work the poem was demanding of me?’ and answers her question with ‘it was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world,’ and so she takes you there too.

These essays recognise that literary criticism usually begins with perplexity or frustration or misunderstanding, and that’s part of the point. Yes, poems are often weird. Reading them is not easy and you have to be willing to change your mind. Sometimes Vendler’s view of a poem can seem challenging or even perverse at first. She claims that William Blake’s ‘The Lamb’ has often been misread and is not as innocent as it sounds:

Little Lamb who made thee   Dost thou know who made theeGave thee life & bid thee feed.By the stream & o’er the mead

Isn’t that just as simple as it comes? But Vendler argues that this is the voice of a child-speaker who is echoing the voice of a priest who has asked him ‘who made thee?’ and required the answer ‘God made me’ (Vendler’s religious upbringing often enables her to hear biblical or liturgical echoes that other readers might miss). The poem’s apparently childlike voice overlays innocence with echoes of experience: a child is playing at being a priest by catechising a lamb. ‘We become spectators of the child’s “innocent” sadism as he humiliates the lamb,’ she says. ‘Sadism’ may take it a bit far: I don’t see much sign that the child wants to torture his interlocutor. But when I started the essay I didn’t think I would be convinced at all, and by its end the poem looked quite different. That’s literary criticism.

Ionly met Vendler once, a long time ago, when I was editing Shakespeare’s Sonnets and she was writing her edition-cum-critical-meditation The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I told her that we had this in common, and she was very gracious. I felt as though I had pulled up alongside the queen’s Bentley in my rusty Ford Escort and said: ‘Hi there, Your Majesty. Look! we’ve both got wheels.’ She then glided off to a grand dinner, leaving a trail of kind words behind her. Her prose sometimes seems queenly. Other critics tend to be mentioned only when she thinks they’re wrong, and her use of the critical ‘we’ often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form. In her writing ‘we’ know exactly who we are – though the sometimes regal, sometimes slightly priestly tone of her prose can occasionally allow the faintest trace of a smile, as when she discusses (in an earlier collection of essays) a description of cunnilingus by A.R. Ammons (one of several poets she has taught me to like). Here are the lines in question:

the tongue, powerful,moving organ, will in thedark find bliss’s button,describe its contours,buffet gently and swirl it

‘I find the diction in this passage not entirely satisfactory,’ she writes, ‘but I admire Ammons’s attempt to describe a common sexual act that has been (as we say these days) “underrepresented” in poetry.’ The schoolmistressly ‘not entirely satisfactory’ is balanced by a little glint of mischief as she puts scare quotes around ‘underrepresented’, as ‘we’ say these days.

Perhaps her ‘we’ can sound sometimes too like a little group of Harvard-educated sophisticates. But Vendler is sufficiently self-aware to know that she shouldn’t sound as though she is excluding people from the charmed circle of intimacy which she believes the lyric creates. Her very orthodox canon (Yeats, Blake, Stevens, Whitman, Heaney) has always had space for women poets: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and here Sylvia Plath and Emily Brontë too. The only living poet discussed in this collection is the Vietnamese American Vuong, and it’s the only essay in which Vendler seems to be trying too hard to open herself to the new. In the best of the essays the poem and the governing concept under which it is discussed pull together, as the reading of the poem alters what you think ‘charm’ or ‘innocence’ might be and as your understanding of those concepts deepens your understanding of the poem. The essay on Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ and motherhood broadens our understanding both of the poem and of motherhood, for instance. The essay on Vuong’s elegy for his mother starts off by asking, ‘Is this poem one of those that will have strength to survive?’, and while Vendler’s reading of the poem (which is a list of Amazon orders that implicitly track the illness and death of Vuong’s mother) explains why it might be arresting now, it doesn’t persuade me that Vuong is a keeper in the canon or that Vendler quite believed he was.

Inhabit the Poem appears in the Library of America, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville and Ursula Le Guin. That’s an elevated podium. Does it belong there? Will it last? Literary criticism typically doesn’t have a long shelf life, and that’s in part because it is or ought to be volatile and occasional: reading is a process of unsettling and rethinking, so the best criticism will unsettle its own moment and then get unsettled or outgrown by the next generation. As Vendler put it in The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar (2015), ‘Scholarly and critical interpretations may not outlast the generation to which they are relevant; as intellectual concepts flourish and wither, so interpretations are proposed and discarded.’ Big ego critics might think they’ll last like Samuel Johnson, but nobody will last like Samuel Johnson, not even Samuel Johnson, who was bigotedly wrong about Milton and who declared: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ So one should be careful about saying that Vendler may not last.

But in twenty years she may seem of her time, keen to appear open to the new and the different while behind the scenes building retaining walls of aesthetic principle around her canon which ensure that no one unruly enters into it. Vendler’s view of lyric is distinctly para-religious – and the essay on Brontë which concludes this volume is about the way the language of religion can be transformed in the lyric to evoke the internal creative spirit. The meditative, the inward, the accommodating, the gently probing are qualities she values above the violent, the creatively confused or the aggressively reformist. So the limits to her tastes are most visible when she is discussing poets who want to turn lyric into a form of social or political action. For her, as for her hero Stevens, a poem ‘must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully’, and the zone of resistance is between reader and poem rather than between poet and society. Adrienne Rich is represented here by ‘The Middle Aged’. Vendler says that when she read the lines ‘For to be young/Was always to live in other peoples’ houses’ as a teenager, ‘I learned … what I was – a provincial girl in a house constituted by persons so alien to me that they were in effect “other people”.’ Rich’s angrier poems, which are directed not towards a genteel liberal ‘we’ but adopt an ‘audience-aimed style’ directed principally towards feminist readers, are rebuked for displaying ‘a regrettable coarseness of expression that she had the courage to abandon in later life’.

The essay on Robert Hayden, who was the first African American writer to be named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as Poet Laureate) reveals some of the limits to Vendler’s sympathies as well as some of the limitations of her way of thinking about the lyric. Her chosen poem is Hayden’s late work ‘[American Journal]’, which is written as though from the perspective of an alien who simulates various kinds of Americanness and studies it like a strange language, as he attempts to understand ‘the imprecise and strangering distinctions by which they live’. ‘Hayden repudiated the narration of victimhood as the chief resource of a minority writer,’ Vendler says, ‘just as he repudiated despair at the racial division of his America.’ She goes on to praise ‘his conviction that the literature of organised protest movements tended towards propaganda, not art’. She is clearly more comfortable with the ironical perspectival shifts of ‘[American Journal]’ than with Hayden’s earlier poems which address more directly and with more anger American racial politics and its history. She briefly mentions ‘Middle Passage’ as one of Hayden’s ‘powerful sequences of African American history’ but avoids further discussion of the poem, which stitches together the voices of slave traders with grim rewritings of The Tempest: ‘Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,/of his bones New England pews are made,/those are altar lights that were his eyes.’

In 2011 Vendler wrote about Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry in the New York Review of Books. She complained that ‘multicultural inclusiveness prevails,’ and objected to what she saw as the anthology’s over-representation of poems by Black Americans and the inflated claims made for them. Dove accused Vendler of ‘barely veiled racism’. Vendler responded simply: ‘I have written the review and I stand by it.’ The painful memories of that exchange, which led to newspaper articles around the world, were no doubt one reason Vendler will have wanted to write appreciatively about ‘[American Journal]’ and why she may not have wanted to venture into the dangerous waters of ‘Middle Passage’. But there are deeper reasons too. Vendler regarded the lyric as a meditative and inward thing, which – in a passage she once quoted from Conrad – displays ‘that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art’. In writing about Ammons and John Ashbery she can be enthused by poems which roll around in mixtures of tones and registers, and which respond to the chaotic abundance of living by shifting lexical gears and glancing from sight to sight. But Hayden’s ‘festering’ transformation of Ariel’s song into a requiem for the forcibly transported was a kind of rough music that she may not have felt she had the vocabulary or perspective to describe. ‘Middle Passage’ also presents a challenge to the injunction in the title of this collection to ‘inhabit the poem.’ What would it mean to inhabit a poem such as ‘Middle Passage’, which juxtaposes a series of voices, all of them articulating attitudes which no one would wish to inhabit?

In an essay on Ashbery from 2005, Vendler asked: ‘How can the lyric – the genre of intimacy – summon into its solitary precinct a sense of our changing society at large, so as to make us, as readers, intimate not only with the author as a private fellow-sufferer but also with his social predicaments (and therefore, by implication, with our own)?’ That is a good question which she never fully answers – and the fact that she probably did not, deep down, want to answer it is apparent in the way the very phrasing of the question returns at its end to ‘our own’ predicaments rather than reaching outwards. Maybe lyric can reflect ‘our changing society at large’ because it isn’t just ‘the genre of intimacy’, but a chaotically indefinable mode sufficiently elastic to allow in bursts of perplexing history and violence and rage, as well as the mind reflecting on itself, or the clicking of a typewriter and the odour of a rose, or the joy of sound or language at play.

Vendler’s squeamishness about lyrics of protest and reform will mark her to some readers now as a liberal for whom literature should be always tolerantly multi-perspectival rather than dangerous or angry. Underpinning her critical judgments is a high valuation of an ego-centred multiplicity of the Whitman sort, in which a polyphony of potentially antagonistic voices is harmoniously orchestrated, or at least held chaotically in time, by the star-spangled baton of the great American ‘I’. That vision of the lyric ‘I’ as plural and surging but ultimately unifiable and inward-turning is a literary and political vision of a distinctively late 19th to late 20th-century American kind, which doubtless does belong in the Library of America because of its clear Americanness. If it can look sometimes politely defensive, and maybe even at times excluding of the ragged and violent voices that can form part of both the repertoire of lyric and of the increasingly ragged and violent and disunited States, that is because all literary critics have their principled boundaries which they will expect their readers to test and at times resist. That kind of dialogue is what literary criticism is about. Only bad critics think they have the last word or that they understand everything equally well.

But to return to the point of it all. Literary criticism is primarily about learning to read very complex creations and situations carefully. That requires a willingness to think and rethink, to take a thought and run with it until it either ceases to be viable or (ideally) generates its own internal impetus. It requires accepting that sometimes you get it wrong and that sometimes other people get it wrong. It makes you pull together a whole range of messy human bits and pieces, from autobiography to philology to counting lines and underlining letters and seeing almost invisible patterns, through histories of individuals and of peoples. All of this can go towards understanding the way a poem might cohere or interestingly not cohere. You’ve got to be bold sometimes in pushing a point and sometimes you’ve got to be humble about things you can’t see or haven’t seen. There’s a dash of politics, or more than a dash if you want that, and there could be a dash of religion too, if that’s your thing. But there has to be a great measure of self-awareness, about where you stand or sit or the corners into which you have been pushed by where you come from. Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile. If that doesn’t have a point to it, just in itself, then probably living doesn’t have a point to it either, because making ad hoc judgments on the basis of a mosaic of information and misinformation about people and about what you should say on a particular occasion, even a difficult one, is what we all need to do every day. Literary criticism is like the mess of life, an exercise in tact and understanding. As Vendler declared in 1982, ‘it exists because it gives pleasure to those who perform it’ and to those who read it, but it also aims ‘to explain some complex state of affairs’. Not all critics take or give pleasure. Not all critics are as good at explaining complexity as Vendler, and even she wasn’t perfect because criticism isn’t a game that can be played perfectly. But she was as good as it gets, and it’s sad that she’s gone.

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number.