America's Best Poetry Critic Has Died

Despite this blog's self-description up at the top of this page, I don't recall ever posting anything here about poetry over the past 21 years.

Until today.

And I'm not posting about poetry -- at least not only about poetry -- but also about poetry criticism -- and not about the work of all poetry critics, but about one in particular.

Professor Helen Vendler
(April 30, 1933 - April 23, 2024)

You could say that as a one-time, part-time poetry columnist for the Dallas Morning News from 1998-2003, I was once in the same line of work as Helen Vendler. That's about as accurate and helpful as saying a cockroach and a lion are the same because they both have legs.

Helen Vendler was a much-honored Harvard Professor of English and American Literature and Language. Her awards were many and her books even more so. I never read a Vendler piece without feeling glad that  I had. According to Wikipedia, "In 2006, The New York Times called Vendler 'the leading poetry critic in America,'" and even her critics would have been hard-pressed to disagree. She was a traditionalist, which made her controversial in some circles, and that probably appealed to my own taste in poetry. 

The death notices and appreciations are starting to pile up, though I fear most of these links are behind a firewall. Even better, check out a book by Vendler and dip in. It will be a great trip.

• The New York Times, Helen Vendler: An Appreciation (She devoted her life to showing us how and why.) Apr. 25.
• Washington Post, Helen Vendler, poetry critic both revered and feared, dies at 90 (Helen Vendler, a literary scholar and reviewer of poetry who was revered and feared in equal measures, whose scalpel-sharp critiques could...) Apr. 25.
• The Boston Globe, Helen Vendler, a towering presence in poetry criticism, has died (Struggling as a single mother in 1967 to raise a son on scant funds while teaching 10 college courses a year, Helen Vendler realized that...) Apr. 24.
• The New York Times, Helen Vendler, 'Colossus' of Poetry Criticism, Dies at 90 (Helen Vendler, one of the leading poetry critics in the United States, with a reputation-making power that derived from her fine-grained,...) Apr. 24.