29 Quotes by Helen Vendler

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

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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 by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

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

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

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

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