Comments on: Helen Vendler on Humanities in our schools http://www.stephensossaman.com/helen-vendler-on-humanities-in-our-schools/ On writing Sat, 22 Oct 2022 13:53:20 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: Roy Robbins http://www.stephensossaman.com/helen-vendler-on-humanities-in-our-schools/comment-page-1/#comment-66374 Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:10:48 +0000 http://www.stephensossaman.com/?p=492#comment-66374 I like Helen Vendler….Sometimes. The review of her comments about American education seem, as the reviewer noted, hopelessly out of touch with most of what is going on in education and our current “culture.”

This is reflected in her books. Her book on Emily Dickinson is quite good. She doesn’t stray too far away from the poems, except to bring us up to date using the latest scholarship about the poems as originally written and new correspondence.

However, her book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets is so idiosyncratic as to be unbelievable. She invents this elaborate system of correspondences, keywords and so forth, and she never deals with how truly bizarre the sonnets are when compared to the sonnet tradition. Shakespeare’s sonnets have a personal obsession about them that Vendler totally misses and this obsession is at the heart of the sonnets, and must be dealt with.

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