Helen Vendler famous quotes

04-29-2025

You donâ€™t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.
-- Helen Vendler

#Voice
The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.
-- Helen Vendler

#Artist #Busy #Disappear
Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.
-- Helen Vendler

#Make Sense
One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
-- Helen Vendler

#Artist #Thinking #People
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
-- Helen Vendler

#Literature #Glory #Modern
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

#Voice #Firsts #Chance
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

#Girl #Twenties
I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.
-- Helen Vendler

#Art #Criticism #My Favorite
The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.
-- Helen Vendler

#Art #Play #Utterance
There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.
-- Helen Vendler

#Fame #Poet
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

#Pages #Way #Precision
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

#Teaching #Together #Spiders
For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.
-- Helen Vendler

#College #Discovery #Views
Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.
-- Helen Vendler

#Soul #Identity
For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isnâ€™t written for poets, itâ€™s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if itâ€™s true for oneself.
-- Helen Vendler

#Self #Expression #Criticism
All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
-- Helen Vendler

#Past #Poet #Exception
A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.
-- Helen Vendler

#Needs #Transformation #Rhythm
I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.
-- Helen Vendler

#Names #Giving #Primitive

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