Memories of Helen Vendler

   Not to console

Or sanctify, but plainly to propound.

            —Wallace Stevens

   

1

 

The death of Helen Vendler in April 2024 ended, for me, a life-altering and life-enhancing relationship that had endured for half a century. Though I was of course familiar with her books and essays, I first met Helen in 1975, when she delivered the Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Skidmore and guest-taught two classes at the college—memorable occasions to which I’ll return. Later, that summer, my wife and I attended her seminar at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. Two years further on, I participated in Helen’s year-long NEH seminar on lyric poetry in Boston. Once again she proved to be a brilliant and passionate teacher, and, in my case, an enthusiastic encourager of the scholarship that eventually emerged as my book Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition. Helen was not only a paragon of academic integrity, generosity, and productive creativity, but a warm and witty friend. As many can attest, when you were a student of Helen’s, and managed to stimulate both her intellectual respect and her affection, the relationship was often sustained. In my case, it became a lifelong bond.

Over the years, I got into the habit of phoning Helen on Sunday mornings. Not that that was her day of rest. For Helen there were no Sunday Morning “complacencies of the peignoir”—a phrase that at first confused a youthful Helen but triggered her lifelong engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. One morning, in Autumn 1991, she noted that she was busy reading student essays. I pictured her filling, as usual, every available margin with ball-pointed annotations and suggestions. On this occasion, she mentioned that she was directing no fewer than sixteen Harvard dissertations! I asked her why, at this advanced stage of her illustrious career (the first woman in the history of Harvard to have attained the rank of University Professor), she was working so hard. “Oh Pat,” she said, “if I weren‘t doing this, I’d be lying on the sofa in my pajamas watching television.” Flushed with guilt, I did not mention that, at that moment, I was sprawled on the living-room sofa in my pajamas with the TV on but muted.

On such Sunday mornings, Helen would not have been attended by a Stevensian cockatoo, but by one of her cats. Like Stevens’s female persona in “Sunday Morning,” Helen would definitely not be attending Mass. Young Helen Hennessy had been raised by highly educated but religiously dogmatic parents. It was, Helen once told me, “a hyperbolically observant Catholic household.” Barred from reading “frivolous” books, forbidden to watch time-wasting television and church-disapproved movies, she had been forced to attend a religious women’s institution, Emmanuel College, rather than a secular institution—despite her precocious interest in science, particularly chemistry. That stringent upbringing, and her own science-nurtured focus on analysis and “evidence,” later the founding principles of her critical approach to poetry, combined eventually not only to sever Helen from her Irish-Catholic roots, but to adopt, quietly but adamantly, a rejection of institutional religion altogether.

Along with our love of cats and of poetry, our status as fallen Irish Catholics was an intimate bond we shared, sometimes explicitly. She admitted that her own rejection of religion, with the repressions of childhood reinforced by the circumstances of her separation and divorce from a former Jesuit priest, Zeno Vendler, fed her resistance to rumors of the deathbed conversion to Catholicism of Wallace Stevens. But, unlike Stevens, Helen, despite her knowledge and love of church hymns, eschewed religious longings. I happened to be in Boston at the time of Robert Lowell’s funeral in 1977, and attended the requiem service at the Church of the Holy Advent, an Oxford Movement church teetering on the brink of Catholicism. After the service, I talked to Helen. She was in tears, distraught not only by the loss of a close friend and poet whose work she admired, but by the church service itself, a ceremony she thought Lowell would not have chosen.

Nor was she pleased by my decision to join the faculty of a Jesuit institution, Le Moyne College. Given her family background and experience with ex-Jesuit Vendler, Helen never lectured at such colleges. Nevertheless, as a personal favor, she agreed to give the keynote address at a 1987 symposium I organized at Le Moyne. Later, again at my urging, she took on as a personal assistant a gifted young Jesuit she came to like and respect—and who subsequently left the Order, married, and emerged as a distinguished novelist. I should add that Helen did not let her personal feelings about faith, or lack thereof, color her teaching or her criticism; indeed, she wrote brilliantly of those two great poet-priests, Anglican George Herbert and Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though in general, Helen was not outspoken about her unbelief, on one occasion, when I acknowledged a moment of incense-scented nostalgia regarding my own lost Catholic faith, she quickly rebuked me for my lapse into misplaced sentimentality.

When she was dying, at the age of ninety, her body having failed, but with her superb mind intact and crystalline as ever, she expressed not the slightest fear of the impending death she was certain ended all. I wonder if, at that end, Helen—who loved to conclude emails and letters by quoting—might have recalled the final words of her dear friend, Seamus Heaney. She had attended his funeral service, and had heard his son Michael’s account of what Seamus had texted his wife minutes before his death: “Noli timere,” don’t be afraid. Though a lapsed Catholic, Heaney was recalling a Latin phrase that appears often in the Vulgate, as when Jesus, walking on the water, calms his disciples during a sea-storm. But for Helen, as for John Keats, the poet and tragic humanist she most loved and admired, life was not a Christian “vale of tears” to be redeemed in some fictional Afterlife, but, in Keats’s existential rather than religious phrase, a “vale of soul-making,” in which an individual’s identity is forged in a crucible of suffering and strenuous creativity. Helen’s own life and death are a testament to that heroic vision.

   

2

 

In a series of exchanges in February 2019, about the time Helen retired, we carried on a sustained discussion of our favorite poet. I had recently published an essay she praised on “Keats and Identity,” and Helen had, back in 1983, published a major book on the Odes, reading them as an integrated sequence. That tour de force had in a minor way been test-run eight years earlier when, visiting Skidmore, she had given, in my Keats seminar, an impromptu lecture on “Psyche,” the “Nightingale,” the “Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn”—all four in a dazzling fifty minutes. Like Helen, I had the Odes by heart. Years later, when she asked me how I had come to commit them to memory, I told her that when I was in the Army in the 1960s, stationed in a remote part of Maryland, I used to walk five miles to and from an “arts cinema” run by a fellow who showed foreign films as matinees. On the return trip, it was usually dark, and I’d keep myself company by chanting aloud poems I was trying to learn by heart, principal among them Keats’s Odes.

When Helen asked one day what I’d “done” in the Army, I told her that I’d been a launcher-control panel operator at a Nike-Hercules nuclear missile site, one of the defensive batteries ringing Washington, D. C. That minor nuclear experience led Helen to ask me if I’d read “What the End is For,” a Jorie Graham poem that, she explained, “begins with one of her Iowa students taking her (illegally of course) to a vantage point from which one could see a huge field of B-52s, ever on the alert, their engines running, ‘sounding like a sickness of the inner ear,’ prepared to destroy any incoming missiles.” In the course of this exchange, Helen mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis. I told her that I’d been on active duty during that period, and that, for the first time in my experience at the base, the nuclear warheads were hooked up and the missiles elevated. Armageddon seemed at hand.

That night, as we all waited for Khrushchev’s response to President Kennedy’s blockade and ultimatum, I looked out with foreboding at the missiles, visible in the moonlight. A few hours later, near dawn, startled by a roaring sound, I ducked out of the trailer and suddenly realized that what I had thought was an engine malfunction was actually the thunder of thousands of creaking quill-feathers and the honking of countless geese headed south. It was October and our base was directly on the Atlantic flyway. It occurred to me that because of what might happen in a matter of hours, these ancient migratory patterns, along with much else, might suddenly be gone forever. As I admitted to Helen, I tried to write a poem recording my feelings, but was, of course, entirely inadequate to so apocalyptic a theme.

This prompted a somewhat cryptic response from Helen. After remarking that “you certainly have had an interesting life,” she asked: “Did I ever tell you that I always know what I’m feeling by the quote that comes unbidden to my mind? I myself was thrilled by the words rising from some depth:

 

   An unaffected man in a negative light

   Could not have borne his labors, nor have died

   Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

 

That’s the best compliment I can imagine—and you are the first person it has ever attached itself to, though I’ve loved it for years.”

As I understood the passage (from Part Two of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”), Stevens’s Planter, not an “unaffected man” but a sensitive individual open to the influence of his beautiful but doomed natural world, is a positive rather than a “negative” figure. Otherwise, he could not have borne his labors and gone to his death the way he did, though sighing that he should have to leave behind even so simple and small a pleasure as his banjo with its distinctive “twang.” Helen’s complimentary attachment of the lines to me may have arisen from her association of this elegiac yet sensuous twang with (via the ominous sound of Graham’s B-52s) my account of the engine-like sound of the geese flying in an October dawn that human folly might well have made their last.

   

3

 

I had some moving exchanges with Helen in September, 2013, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Seamus Heaney. I had recently told Helen that in 1997, while I was teaching at the Yeats Summer School, one of the students who had accompanied me to Sligo introduced me to a new friend: a young man who wrote poetry, and who had informed her that it was his “life’s ambition to buy Seamus Heaney a pint of beer.” We were standing in the lobby of the Silver Swan, and no sooner had this life-ambition been imparted to me than I spotted Seamus entering the hotel. As a recent Nobel Laureate, he was, however unwillingly, attended by a small entourage. I caught his eye, walked over and told him that I had in tow a young man whose life’s ambition was to buy him a pint of beer. “Bring him over,” said Seamus. The thrilled young man informed Heaney that this was indeed his life’s ambition. “No time like the present” says Seamus. The young man bolted to the bar, returning (in record time for Guinnesses) with three pints. What makes this a Heaney story is that Seamus, crowded by admirers, spent several minutes questioning this star-struck young man about his poetry and making suggestions. When I related the episode to Helen, she replied that there were “many such stories, all tributes to Seamus’s kindness and generosity of spirit.” Though Helen was edgier than Seamus, the same could be said of her.

I phoned Helen the day the shocking news broke of Heaney’s unexpected death. She was at Logan Airport, about to board a flight to Dublin for the funeral. She was not in the best of health, and knowing the depth of their bond, I asked how she was bearing up. She admitted that she was devastated; in fact, I don’t believe Helen ever fully recovered from Seamus’s death. When she was back from Ireland and girding herself to write the obituary (which evolved into an account of the stages of Heaney’s poetic development), I sent her a copy of a superb pencil sketch I had come across. Drawn by Catherine Edmunds a few months before his death, it wonderfully caught Heaney’s benign charisma and mischievous sense of humor. Delighted with the sketch, Helen placed it above her computer desk. It would, she said, in struggling to write this obituary, be her “great presider.” She knew how pleased I would be by the unspoken analogy: Keats’s placement above his desk, while he was writing Endymion, of a portrait of Shakespeare, to serve as his “great presider.” She added, “What a great-hearted person Keats was—has anyone like him ever followed? Seamus comes closest.”

Though it was intended to appear in a journal, Helen accepted my suggestion that she publish her tribute to Heaney—born the year Yeats died and his great successor—as the prologue to a new collection of essays to which I’d contributed: a volume commemorating the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. When, a few years later, I told her that the same editor wanted to dedicate a subsequent collection to Harold Bloom (and had asked me for Jeanne Bloom’s address in order to request permission), Helen remarked that a former student she barely remembered “dedicated a book to me without asking permission, but thanking me for all I had taught him. I winced in embarrassment, while of course writing to thank him.” Reading this, it occurred to me that I had originally intended, sans permission, to dedicate to Helen my own new book on Yeats, focused on the love poetry to his Muse, Maud Gonne. The death of Harold Bloom had altered that plan. The final version of the changed Acknowledgement reads: “This Muse-shadowed volume, dedicated to Harold Bloom, would have been, were it not for the discourtesy of death, dedicated to Helen Vendler, who read one entire version of the manuscript with her usual critical acumen and unrivaled love and knowledge of lyric poetry.”

To congratulate me on the publication of the book, Helen sent me as a gift a high-quality reprint of a dramatic 1903 image of Yeats by the distinguished American photographer, Alice Broughton, inscribed: “For Pat, with many memories of Sligo and with thanks for much Yeatsian instruction.” My “vice versa” was an obvious understatement. I had learned from Helen’s first book, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays, a dissertation chosen because she felt inadequate at the time to critically engage Yeats’s major poems. When, four decades later, she did so in Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, her principal thanks for “Yeatsian instruction” had been extended, more appropriately, to Warwick Gould.

That inescapable “discourtesy of death” (from Yeats’s elegy for Robert, the son of Lady Gregory) has now deprived us of Helen as well as Seamus and Harold. I’m reminded of several email exchanges I had with her during what turned out to be the final year of her life. Helen ended one by referring to her recent birthday and attaching two photographs—one taken by her son David; the other a photo of a commissioned painting (by Mary Minifie) with Helen swathed in a rich, red scarf:

I hope you are “keeping well,” as they say; I’m as well as could be expected at 90: see attached photo on my 90th birthday, at my son’s house at Laguna Beach. I also attach a photo of the portrait of me commissioned by my Cambridge college, Magdalene; it will be hung on the wall behind the high table in their beautiful (un-electrified, as ever) 15th century hall, next to (at last hearing) the portrait of Nelson Mandela (also an Honorary Fellow): he the first Black, I the first woman: “A scene well-set, and excellent company.” Love, Helen

Our letters and emails tended (unsurprisingly) to be riddled with poetic allusions: a kind of affectionate shorthand. Sending me, back in 1980, a copy of her Part of Nature, Part of Us, she referred, with Hamletesque dismissiveness, to this selection of previously-published essays as her “funeral-baked meats.” In the email in which she attached a photo of the formal painting that would hang beside Mandela’s above the high table in Magdalene she chose a more appropriate sign-off quotation: “A scene well-set, and excellent company,” from the first of Yeats’s two full-length poems on Lady Gregory’s great house, Coole Park.

   

4

 

Given the capaciousness and generosity of mind she demonstrated during our decades of exchanges, and everywhere evident in her decades of teaching, I’m reluctant to dwell on the critical controversies that sometimes swirled about Helen. As the most powerful poetry critic in the English-speaking world, she was feared as well as revered, a titan who could make or break reputations. I recall once walking with her through a book display at a Modern Language Association conference. A poet-critic we both knew loomed into view. She smiled and started toward me, but then spotted Helen trailing slightly behind. She took off like a shot off a shovel. “Wasn’t that so-and so,” Helen asked. I nodded Yes. “Then why,” Helen continued, “did she disappear like that?” I reminded her of the opening sentence in her recent review of this woman’s new book on a major poet: So-and so, “herself a poet, should be ashamed to have written this book.” “Well, it’s true,” said Helen. I responded that that wasn’t the issue; that I was merely explaining why the woman had fled at the very sight of her. Helen often seemed caught off guard by such responses. She was an anything but unkind and uncaring person, as legions of grateful students have confirmed. But she burned her candle at the altar of lyric poetry, and, in the aesthetic arena, personalities were secondary. Depending on circumstances, Helen could be remarkably direct: a combination of intellectual curiosity and critical acuity that could come off as intimidating. One example comes to mind.

In 1995, on the centenary of his birth, I was in Cork researching a book on Michael Collins. I was having lunch in the university cafeteria with an old friend who had just introduced me to two young bright ABDs. Who should walk by, lunch-tray in hand, but Helen! She was in Cork for a conference, and we were surprised to see each other. She gave me a hug and asked if she could join us. Needless to say, she could. After the introductions, Helen asked the two awed UCC doctoral students about their dissertations. As it happened, one, a young woman, was writing on Wallace Stevens, the other, a seemingly confident young fellow, on the critical impact of Harold Bloom. We were off to the races.

Having peppered the young Stevensian with questions on her approach and focus, Helen turned to the young man writing on Bloom: “Pro or con?” she asked. “Con, I guess,” responded the now tentative scholar. “Ah,” said Helen. “Why?” Flustered for the moment, the young man replied that there were areas about which Bloom was uninformed. Helen persisted: “Really? What is it that Harold doesn’t know?” Though there wasn’t much that Harold Bloom didn’t know, I was aware from our previous conversation that the young man had principally in mind Bloom’s dismissal of, among other isms, New Historicism. But now, in the formidable presence of Helen Vendler, the beleaguered young man seemed at a loss for words. The time had come to intervene, to replace what had become an inquisition with lighter banter.

 

Though she was always intellectually curious, and, though affectionately, demanding of her students, such relentless grilling was not typical of Helen— certainly not in the classroom, nor, for the most part, in her reviews and critical essays. In fact, since she revered talent, especially new talent, most of Helen’s reviews were positive. But she did not hold back in the presence of mediocrity; or when she felt that the intrinsic values of poetry had been slighted. When she was defending poetry, Helen became the colossus she was reputed to be, and certainly did not shy away from controversy. I’ll mention just two instances.

Predictably defending poetry and intrinsic criticism, Helen polarized a 1990 conference on “Revolutionary Romanticism” by fiercely criticizing two of the presentations on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” One had criticized the poem on gender grounds. Rejecting the other, which she characterized as a “vulgar” New Historicist assault on the poem, Helen pointed out that Wordsworth did not conceal (or “repress” or “exclude”) his “political investments and political disillusionment in his poetry as a whole”; she therefore called it “absurd” that he should “be obliged to mention them in every poem.” Unlike the Books of The Prelude in which he discussed at length his initial enthusiasm and eventual disenchantment with the French Revolution, in the case of “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth had chosen—and surely, Helen insisted, a poet has the right to choose his own subject matter and theme—to focus not on politics, but on his changing psychological and imaginative engagement with the Wye landscape.

Though accused by some of imperious elitism, and impatience with viewpoints that varied from her own, it is not at all true that for Helen it was her way or the highway. In the classroom, she often expressed gratitude to students who made points that enhanced or even altered her interpretation. What mattered was the best reading of a poem, not who proposed it. I have my own example, involving one of the rare occasions I disagreed with her. It had to do with “On Woman,” one of Yeats’s “Solomon and Sheba” poems. Helen had for years been teaching “On Woman” as, like the other two poems in that sequence, referring to the poet’s wife. On the basis of both intrinsic and external evidence, I persuaded her that this Solomon and Sheba poem had to do, instead, with Maud Gonne. Without the slightest hint of annoyance let alone resentment, indeed with sheer pleasure, Helen announced that “henceforth if belatedly,” she would be teaching “On Woman” and thinking about it “accurately.” What mattered was not the critic’s ego, but the poem under scrutiny—and poetry itself.

That insistence helps explain the second, and most famous, controversy involving Helen, a difference between friends that became a literary brouhaha in America and beyond. It occurred in 2011, when Helen mounted, in the New York Review of Books, a scathing attack on the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work Helen admired and whose early reputation owed a good deal to Vendler’s championship. Though open to diverse and neglected voices, Helen declared that Rita’s anthology had sacrificed aesthetic quality to overly wide representation and diversity. She had a point, but her tone seemed (even to me) too authoritative.

Surprised and wounded, Rita Dove responded, at length, in an intemperate letter to the editor. Helen told me during a phone call that Robert Silvers, the editor of the NYRB, gave her a heads-up, noting that if he printed the whole of Dove’s diatribe (which far exceeded the length normally allotted to letters), it would leave little room for Helen to respond. “Let her have her say,” Helen told him; and when the exchange was printed, Helen took just nine words: “I wrote the review, and I stand by it.” I mention this because of a note to Rita Dove written by Helen on her deathbed. Posted by Dove the following day, it was brought to my attention by Robert Boyers, the founder-editor of Salmagundi. The exchange with Rita initiated by Helen as she was dying is certainly, as Bob said, “very moving.” So were her last notes to me, though there was, between us, nothing to forgive after a half-century of affectionate exchanges. I’ll refer to a few of these before returning to the more momentous exchange between Helen and Rita Dove.

   

5

 

In mid-January 2024, I wrote to Helen about Seamus Heaney’s “Hermit Songs,” a poetic sequence which had first appeared in Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (2009) and, the following year and specifically dedicated to Helen, in Human Chain, which turned out, sadly, to be Heaney’s final collection. One of the Irish hermit-poets cited by Heaney, asked which attribute of character was best, replied: “Steadiness, for it is best/ When a man has set his hand to tasks/ To persevere. I never heard/ Fault found with that.” That character trait tallies with Heaney’s own faith, which (in the ninth and final poem in the sequence) he vests “In steady-handedness maintained/ In books against its vanishing.” The appropriateness of the dedication of these poems to Helen is confirmed by her own lifelong perseverance in whatever task was at hand—despite a repressive family background, early misogynistic academic obstacles, the difficulties of single motherhood, later illnesses and, ultimately, the omnipresence of death. But everything “vanishes.” What was required, in life and in poetry, Helen insisted in her moving Last Looks, Last Books (2011), was balance. Analyzing the “poetry of dying,” Helen asked how can a poem “do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit?” That balance, which she characterized aesthetically as the maintenance of a “binocular style,” defined, she believed, both human courage and successful elegiac poetry.

In responding to my queries about a few obscure details in “Hermit Songs,” Helen, uncharacteristically, did not address the issue directly. Instead, she forwarded some annotations by another scholar. Though grateful for her help, I was deeply disturbed by her reason for not engaging at length: “Dear Pat, I’m not up to sustained correspondence these days—too tired, too old. Please forgive me. 90 is a taxing age.” But then, demonstrating the old steadiness and dedication to the task at hand, she added that she “had to write a speech for Magdalene and a new piece for Leon”—referring to the painting to be hung in Magdalene and to her next, and what would prove to be her final, contribution (on Walt Whitman’s war poetry) to Leon Wieseltier’s quarterly, Liberties.

War and poetry remind me of our final exchange, in April. That turned out to be the month of Helen’s death, though I had no idea that her death was imminent, or that it was cancer that was drawing near. In her email, Helen expressed affection in general, along with appreciation of an attempt at jeu d’esprit I’d sent her (though rightly unimpressed by my attempts at serious poetry, Helen claimed to “thoroughly enjoy” most of my ventures into light verse). This was an admiring, irreverent (and, inadvertently, untimely) limerick marking the bicentennial of bisexual Byron’s death in April 1824, felled by malaria in Missolonghi while preparing to fight in the cause of Greek independence:

 

  George Gordon, Lord Byron, was cute,

  “Mad, bad, and dangerous” to boot;

    If they tossed Grecian curls,

    He preferred boys to girls,

  But still died like a man—ah salute!

 

Helen of course recognized the allusion to Lady Caroline Lamb’s characterization of Milord; but she also knew that Byron, pressed to have a priest hear his confession, had wavered but resisted. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised, Helen was aware of Byron’s deathbed words: “No, let’s be a man to the end.”

She ended this note, too, by referring to her exhaustion, but with stoicism. Back in February 2019, slowly recovering from a rare and debilitating bronchial affliction, she’d written: “I’m better, but still suffer daily fatigue; when I complain to my son, he says, ‘Think of where your parents were at your age.’ Since they were both dead, I really can’t complain.” Her son had evidently inherited Helen’s sense of humor; I responded simply that beneath the wit and cold comfort, David had a point.

Nor was his mother complaining as she approached her own death. On April 25, two days after Helen died, Bob Boyers, saddened by that news, passed on to me the earlier-mentioned email, Helen’s “Last Words to Rita Dove.” Somewhat surprisingly and somewhat edited, they had been posted the day before on Rita’s Facebook page, with this preface: “The eminent poetry scholar and critic Helen Vendler died on April 23, 2024 at the age of 90. Just hours before her death she sent me an email, excerpted below (in which she references her review of my Penguin Anthology and my response in NYRB).” In bidding farewell “from a great admirer,” Helen did not retract the aesthetic judgment she had passed back in 2011 (a point made clearer in the portion of the note Rita Dove replaced with an ellipsis), but she did express sorrow for having caused pain:

Dearest Rita:

I’m about to die from cancer, and this note will come to you after my death. It is among the last I will write. I am sorry for any pain caused you by my review […..] I hope you will believe that I have never lost faith in you as a lyric poet, and that I have always admired you for your imagination, mythical and literary. I wish we could have continued friends, but I recognized, even while writing the review, that that might become impossible to you, and regretted it. Now that I am on my deathbed, I wanted to send you a salute for the unforgettable poems you have given to the world, and to wish you the very best prospects for your continuing health and writing.

Yours,

Helen

 

Despite Helen’s writing that “this note will come to you after my death,” Rita Dove had responded:

 

Dear Helen,

Your note filled me with profound sorrow. If this note reaches you, please know that I have always mourned the loss of our friendship and am saddened to hear that you are leaving all of us now. I hope this next stage is pain-free and peaceful. Fare thee well, old friend!

Yours, Rita

At 7:30 that evening, David wrote to Rita on his mother’s behalf: “I read your response to her. She was glad for it.” Less than an hour later, Helen died, unafraid (Noli timere), and thinking not of herself nor of any life to come, but of this life; of others we have affected during it, whether to help or, unavoidably or unintentionally, to hurt; and of the only two things she judged to be imperishable: human love and great poetry. How fitting that she should die on the very day, April 23rd, usually ascribed to the death of the greatest of poets, all of whose 154 sonnets Helen had not only examined in her book-length study, but had committed to memory.

In forwarding to me the unfortunately truncated but moving exchange between Helen Vendler and Rita Dove, Bob Boyers observed that “It raises so many questions about the entailments involved in the work of writing and criticism especially; its seductions and dangers. First thing I thought of when I read Helen’s obituary yesterday is that ‘Pat should write about her for the Fall Salmagundi. A personal essay.’ If that appeals to you as a prospect I can send you just a few brief thoughts from my own very modest, very long ago interactions with Helen.”

I hoped, reading this note, that those long-ago interactions would include the time that Helen, at Skidmore in 1975 to deliver that Phi Beta Kappa lecture, sat in (I was also invited) on Bob’s contemporary poetry class. The student assistant who was to run off copies of a poem Bob particularly wanted Helen to address somehow fumbled the assignment. Bob hurriedly grabbed the just-arrived issue of the New Yorker, jogged to the departmental printer and ran off copies of what turned out to be a new John Ashbery poem. Bob distributed it to us all, then read it aloud. It was, as I recall, about thirty lines long, each line beautiful, the poem as a whole impenetrable; at least at first sight to us lesser mortals. Bob asked our guest if she’d like to take a stab at it. Though, like the rest of us, she was seeing it for the first time, Helen explicated the poem line by line, clarifying it with such lucidity that (the Vendler Effect) we looked at each other, nodding “of course,” and wondering why we hadn’t seen this for ourselves. She then proceeded to pronounce the poem good but derivative, “second-order Stevens”! (Helen would later, in 2004, praise Ashbery—revealingly, as “the first notable American poet to have freed himself” from all creeds, “religious, philosophic, or ideological.”)

That spontaneous classroom performance back in 1975 was only one of innumerable demonstration of Helen’s incomparable skill as a construer of poetic syntax. Like many others, Seamus Heaney deemed Helen our “best close reader of poems,” and, for Harold Bloom, she was the “most remarkably agile and gifted close reader in the country.” Ironically enough, though it was perennially applied to her, Helen disliked the term “close reader,” which suggested scrutinizing the text with a “microscope from outside.” She preferred, she told poet Henri Cole in a 1996 Paris Review interview, to think of the ideal critic as one who “goes inside a room and describes the architecture,” one who reads a poem “from the point of view” of the poet who wrote it. And that required a powerful synthesis of empathy, analytic intelligence, and a passionately intense focus on the intrinsic evidence there, in the poem itself—on aesthetic beauty which is its own excuse for being.

Like the great Romantics, Helen, in her passion for poetry and her lucidity in clarifying it for others, fused head and heart: a fusion embodied in her life. Dedicating one of her books to her son, Helen, quoting Ben Jonson‘s “Epigram: To a Friend and Son,” coupled the qualities at the center of her work, and their ultimate progeny: “Freedom and truth; with love from those begot.” In rising from her own repressive past, rejecting parental and credal dogma in favor of freedom, truth, and the emotion that shapes both life and lyric, Helen made an affirmative and unique contribution to literary criticism—the function of which, to adapt what Stevens (again in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) said of poetry itself, was “not to console/ Or sanctify, but plainly to propound.” In celebrating “great-hearted” Keats, Helen wondered (she thought “Seamus comes closest”): “has anyone like him ever followed?” I wonder the same in regard to Helen. Perhaps. But “I am in despair”—as Yeats was in contemplating the Municipal Gallery portrait of his deceased friend, Augusta Gregory—“that time may bring/ Approved patterns of women or of men/ But not that selfsame excellence again.”

For weeks after her death I was too distraught to write in a sustained way about Helen; most of what is poured out here was written in two 12-hour bursts. The loss of Harold Bloom affected me deeply, but not like the death of Helen. At first I could neither interpret nor articulate the cascade of feelings I was experiencing. I turned for solace to my copy of the lovely portrait of Helen soon to accompany Mandela’s in Magdalene’s ancient hall, and to the beautiful finale of James Joyce’s great short story, “The Dead”—prose as close as it ever gets to Helen’s chosen area of expertise, emotionally-infused lyric poetry. And there, in those final elegiac pages, was the answer: the explanation of my complex response, emotional and intellectual, to everything Helen had meant to me over the past half-century. It is not a word that comes trippingly to my tongue; but, as a stricken and perplexed Gabriel Conroy says to himself following his wife’s revelation of the secret at the heart’s-core of her inner life: “such a feeling must be love.”