The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics

“Essential Vendler.”
—Chicago Tribune

A leading partisan of close reading defends aesthetics as the beating heart of criticism.

The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a sea change in literary criticism. As deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and other currents dethroned the New Criticism in the American academy, those who held fast to formalist approaches appeared increasingly outmoded. Critics, as Helen Vendler put it, had been “put on notice” by literary theory.

Fortunately, Vendler was up t...