Helen Vendler's Generous Mind

"Vendler, who died last week, at ninety, served as The New Yorker’s poetry critic from 1978 to 1996, and the temptation, as always in the wake of extraordinary lives, is to install her promptly on the pantheon, with a likeness made in chilly stone. There is no exaggeration in calling her the most influential American poetry scholar of the past fifty years. She was as brilliant at illuminating the old as at championing the new; it is unusual for an academic who produces the definitive contemporary account of Shakespeare’s verse (as in 'The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets') or of Wallace Stevens’s weird, uninviting long poems (in' On Extended Wings') to be the same writer who notices poets as distinct as Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, and Ocean Vuong. Vendler didn’t follow literary or academic fashions. Nor did she operate, as some critics claim to, by intuition or 'taste.'"

Read more from The New Yorker here.