Helen Vendler

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

— Helen Vendler

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about…

— Helen Vendler

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

— Helen Vendler

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

— Helen Vendler

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse.…

— Helen Vendler

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is…

— Helen Vendler

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate…

— Helen Vendler

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

— Helen Vendler

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language,…

— Helen Vendler

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

— Helen Vendler

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

— Helen Vendler

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

— Helen Vendler

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

— Helen Vendler

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

— Helen Vendler

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

— Helen Vendler

I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a…

— Helen Vendler

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

— Helen Vendler

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is…

— Helen Vendler

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were…

— Helen Vendler

When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made…

— Helen Vendler

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

— Helen Vendler

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…

— Helen Vendler

“Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.”

— Helen Vendler

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read…

— Helen Vendler

“In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them .... A writer…

— Helen Vendler