In the LRB, Colin Burrow reviews Helen Vendler’s posthumous Inhabit the Poem while asking what literary criticism is for at all. The stakes are concrete: Exeter wants to make roughly a third of its English department redundant, Canterbury Christ Church has stopped offering English degrees, and A-level English has lost about a third of its students since 2000.
Burrow’s complaint about most defenses of the subject is that they surrender to the market — “don’t worry, it will get you a job” is offered “to the dingy gods of the marketplace.” Criticism’s real value, he argues, is closer to what Vendler practiced for a lifetime:
- Criticism starts from frustration and perplexity, not certainty — “it was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world”
- Her method: pair a whole poem with a governing concept, and notice what everyone else missed (Cowper’s dead hare under the aspect of “charm”)
- Her rereading of Blake’s “The Lamb”: a child playing priest, catechizing a lamb — “we become spectators of the child’s ‘innocent’ sadism”
But Vendler’s liberalism had hard edges, and Burrow prosecutes them. Her lyric is inward, meditative, para-religious; she rebuked Adrienne Rich’s angry feminist poems for “regrettable coarseness,” and in this collection praises Robert Hayden’s “[American Journal]” while steering around “Middle Passage” — the poem that turns The Tempest into a slave-ship requiem, “of his bones New England pews are made.”
Her 2011 attack on Rita Dove’s anthology for “multicultural inclusiveness” drew the charge of “barely veiled racism”; her reply: “I have written the review and I stand by it.”
Burrow’s answer is that criticism is a model of living, not a marketable skill: bold, humble, self-aware judgment on a “mosaic of information and misinformation.” Or, as he puts it: criticism “is like the mess of life, an exercise in tact and understanding” — and if it has no point in itself, then probably living doesn’t either.