Colin Burrow Reviews Helen Vendler's Posthumous Essay Collection 'Inhabit the Poem'
Colin Burrow reviews Helen Vendler's posthumous essay collection, Inhabit the Poem, released by the Library of America, in the London Review of Books. Vendler, who passed away in April 2024, explored lyric poetry spanning from John Donne to Ocean Vuong. The collection highlights the enjoyment found in literary criticism. Burrow points out that her essays frequently incorporate entire poems and relate them to larger ideas. He commends her meticulousness while addressing the decline of English studies, mentioning the University of Exeter's intention to reduce its English department by a third and the decrease in A-level English literature entries since 2000. Burrow ultimately reflects on the significant loss of Vendler.
Key facts
- Helen Vendler died in April 2024.
- Inhabit the Poem is a posthumous collection of Vendler's essays published by the Library of America.
- The collection discusses lyric poems from John Donne to Ocean Vuong.
- The University of Exeter announced plans to make roughly a third of its English department redundant.
- Canterbury Christ Church University has stopped offering English degrees.
- Since 2000, A-level English literature entries in England have dropped by around a third to around 36,000.
- A-level business studies has about 45,000 students, up from about 30,000 in 2005.
- Vendler's 2011 review of Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology in the New York Review of Books led to accusations of 'barely veiled racism' from Dove.
Entities
Artists
- Helen Vendler
- Colin Burrow
- John Donne
- Ocean Vuong
- William Cowper
- Wallace Stevens
- William Blake
- Sylvia Plath
- Emily Brontë
- Robert Hayden
- Rita Dove
- A.R. Ammons
- John Ashbery
- Adrienne Rich
- Emily Dickinson
- Marianne Moore
- W.B. Yeats
- Walt Whitman
- Seamus Heaney
- Samuel Johnson
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Eudora Welty
- Elizabeth Bishop
- Herman Melville
- Ursula Le Guin
- Brian Eno
- William Shakespeare
Institutions
- University of Exeter
- Canterbury Christ Church University
- Library of America
- New York Review of Books
- London Review of Books
- Harvard University
- Penguin
Locations
- England
- United States
- London
- United Kingdom