In a one sentence response to Rita Dove’s letter of complaint following Helen Vendlers’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?” in The New York Review of Books, Vendler states, “I have written the review and I stand by it.” When Vendler first showed up at Harvard to study English, the chair of the department told her “We don’t want any women here.” She was subsequently offered a teaching position upon graduating, and turned it down. She returned to Harvard in 1984 and taught there until her death, while maintaining ties at Boston University so as not to be Harvard’s “little token person.” Her parents were school teachers and devout Roman Catholics. Her first degree was not in English, but in chemistry, and she was alert to the ways her early training as a scientist shaped her: “I don’t like criticism that is simply rhetorically assertive at a very high level without much reference to evidence in the text.” It seems wrong to me that Helen Vendler and Elizabeth Hardwick never knew each other. “We never had a conversation,” Vendler writes in “Dearest Lizzie,” her review of the two books edited by Saskia Hamilton that pertain to Robert Lowell’s notorious The Dolphin and Hardwick’s “dolphin letters.” I love her best as an early champion of Amy Clampitt, the poet who published her first book at the age of sixty-three, The Kingfisher, to great acclaim. Vendler’s favorable review in The New Yorker went far in distinguishing the late bloomer, to the point of causing the poet to require antidepressants, for the first time in her life—Clampitt’s nerves could hardly stand the praise. Years later, regarding less generous reviews, Vendler counseled Clampitt in a letter: “Relax. Those of us who love your language are not about to desert you. And those who don’t love it may love something else, and thereby save their souls in some other direction, or so I hope…Odd, isn’t it, taste.”
-Morgan English