Vendler Review

If I go on at length about Invisible Listeners, it is bound to seem an overreaction, since the book is so small, hardly a book — 80 short pages, plus a few pages of notes. Invisible Listeners, subtitled Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery, is based on the Farnum Lectures given by Helen Vendler at Princeton in 2004. When you are an eminent literary critic, you may find it quite easy to turn your lectures into a book with the aid of editors and your assistant. Such ease might be slightly bad for the soul of a critic, but (A) I'd rather see Vendler enjoy such opportunities than theory-oriented critics, and (B) naturally I'd like to have my own soul tested by such opportunities (but I think I'd have to write for at least fifty more years to get the chance, and I'm already fifty-seven).

Since I'm going to present several objections and resistances to what Vendler does in Invisible Listeners, let me first remember five reasons to be favorably disposed toward her and it.

1) Vendler loves poems. How strange it is to compliment a literary critic on this as a special virtue, but in the Age of Theory her heartfelt human appreciations look admirably untrendy.

2) Vendler writes engagingly, and clearly. (Or with apparent clarity, anyway; she rarely flourishes any professional jargon; as you read along, you feel spoken to in a cordial human voice; although when you think carefully about her arguments, you may find her prose getting smoky at key moments.)

3) She tries nervy juxtapositions: a book about Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery! Why not? (Vendler recently published a book on Pope, Whitman, Dickinson and Yeats.) Three poets of drastically different periods, beliefs, styles, concerns — maybe it can be refreshing to see what they share.

4) Vendler's earlier work on George Herbert, and Wallace Stevens, was wonderfully helpful, and indeed many of her essays have helped me understand poets better.

5) Though I've disagreed with nearly half of her judgments of contemporary poets, at least she hasn't pretended that we don't evaluate poets when we ponder and discuss them; and her opinions are always interesting; how many critics can you say that about?

(There is also a shady sixth reason to praise Vendler's book: she wields power in the contemporary poetry world; I might benefit from her good will, or suffer from her ill will! But of course it would be disrespectful both to myself and to Vendler if I let this worry skew my review.)

Invisible Listeners is based on the observation that poets sometimes address their poems to certain "listeners" — specific audiences-of-one — who are "invisible" because they are irrevocably removed from the poet's real-life quotidian world. Poets do this, Vendler says, because they feel some profound inadequacy in the social relations available to them. The central examples are: Herbert addressing God (in such poems as "The Glimpse," "Perseverance," "Even-Song," "The Quidditie," "Love Unknown," and "Dialogue"); Whitman addressing readers in the future (especially in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"); and Ashbery addressing Francesco Parmigianino, an artist in the past, in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". In selecting her examples, Vendler looks for a sense of "intimacy" in the address to the invisible listener: not the mere fact of the address, but a feeling of interactive warmth, close personal connection between poet and listener.

Thus the category Vendler proposes for study and appreciation has three defining criteria: (1) direct address to the listener, (2) invisibility of the listener, and (3) intimacy (or the seeking of intimacy) between poet and listener. These three criteria ostensibly create a distinct category, a category fairly rare, populated perhaps with dozens of poems rather than thousands. The "intimacy" element in particular serves to set aside the countless poems addressed to God (or other supernatural beings or forces) in a spirit of traditional reverence from a great distance. The element of "invisibility" meanwhile serves to set aside all human addressees alive in the poet's present (including all romantic beloveds) and all individuals personally known to the poet even if they have died (such as Ben Jonson's dead son). A person known to the poet, no matter how warmly addressed and no matter how painfully yearned for (an absent lover, a dead child or parent or spouse or friend), does not qualify as an Invisible Listener in Vendler's terms.

The three criteria propose a distinctly defined topic, but there are many signs that Vendler senses the firm definition is inhibiting, and also that the supposed parallels among Herbert, Whitman and Ashbery are highly problematic; as she carries on her discussions, she blurs the edges of her topic in ways I find rather maddening because the blurring is so un-self-critical. Vendler seems ambivalent about the scope of her project. Is she arguing for an unexpected narrow similarity (of emotional orientation) between drastically different poets in a few of their poems — a task appropriate for an appealingly tendentious essay — or is she writing a book about the relation between the lyric impulse and the absence of the beloved? Invisible Listeners floats between those two coherent intentions.

Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery . . . What is odd about this catchy lineup? Well, you don't often hear Herbert and Whitman spoken of together — but it isn't absurd, since there is a deep sense in which Whitman is a religious poet (though his religion is an inconsistent eclectic self-inventing thing often indistinguishable from a transcendental humanism). Also, you could argue that both The Temple and Leaves of Grass present a man struggling, with heroic and anxious candor, to define and endlessly redefine a spiritually healthy self — something repeatedly elusive but urgently desired. Herbert, Whitman . . . and Ashbery? What's odd is the conjunction of two great poets and one tremendously prolific and overcelebrated minor poet.

I've been fascinated (I don't want to say obsessed) by the Ashbery inflation for some thirty years, and I've written before on my sense that Ashbery's poems don't care enough about the reader. And the whole issue of any poet's relation to The Reader is something I find importantly underpondered in Invisible Listeners. These two concerns (one not so big, and one huge) are what prompted me to write about this short book, and I have disproportionately much to say about them below.

In her chapter on George Herbert, Vendler writes convincingly and movingly about poems in which Herbert's attitude toward God does seem warmer and closer and more interpersonal than the attitudes we would expect in acts of worship. Vendler brings this out confidently and gracefully, with the attention to nuance that has always been essential to her value as a critic. Though she doesn't present herself as a Christian commentator, Vendler is imaginatively at home in Herbert's poems. Her readings may not be groundbreaking (as her 1975 book on Herbert was), but they reawaken us to unique qualities of Herbert. (I was raised as an atheist, am an atheist; Herbert is the only religious poet who has ever made me feel a profound tug of attraction toward — not faith exactly, but the life of faith.) In a discussion of Herbert's "Dialogue," Vendler helps us see the interaction between human and Savior as something more like a difficult friendship (despite inequality) than like a hierarchical encounter between servant and lord.

In this quarrel of intimates, the sinner's reluctance produced

Jesus' logic; Jesus' logic produced the sinner's counterlogic;

and then Jesus' emotion produced the sinner's responsive

emotion, a synchrony allowing the participants' tones to mirror

each other in a common poignancy, and the poem to end on a

"Dialogue" ends with a line in which the human sinner, Herbert, interrupts Jesus who has been arguing for the sinner's acceptance of His difficult but saving love.

That as I did freely part

With my glorie and desert,

Left all joyes to feel all smart —

Ah! no more: thou break'st my heart.

Vendler's way of characterizing the encounter as intimate makes emotional sense of Herbert's having the nerve to interrupt his Savior. These two speakers know each other well, even if they exist on different planes of being. Vendler observed in her 1975 book The Poetry of George Herbert that in this poem Christ "uses all the most human of means — irony, pun, comparison with himself — to win the sinner. . . . Herbert's Jesus is credible as a projection of the self because he speaks the same language as the self, and the air of true conversation is maintained . . ."

For Vendler, the value of such poems in which divinity is humanized, or imagined in a warmly personal way, does not consist only in their showing how to relate to God. She says that such poems also show us how to relate to each other, and she implies that Herbert intends this: "By projecting what we know of the pains and difficulties of actual intimacy onto a symbolic plane of abstract modeling, Herbert composes a manual of instruction toward better forms of intimacy in the actual world." I'm not sure that Herbert understood himself to be a teacher (in his poems) of better interpersonal interaction, but I'd like to think so; in any case Vendler's suggestion reminds us of something obvious yet weirdly easy for some critics to forget, namely that Herbert's poems — like all poems, or so I want to argue — are aimed at us. They are addressed (in one sense of the verb) to us — to The Reader. The reader is always understood to be a listener; a listener with more or less of what Vendler calls visibility, depending on how confident the poet is of a contemporary readership.

To Vendler that truth may seem so axiomatic as to be pointless to dwell on and a mere distraction from her focus on Invisible Listeners such as Herbert's Jesus or Ashbery's Parmigianino. But I think a poem's interest in the reader is a crucial formative factor in its ethical significance and aesthetic value, and to elide or smudge this obvious (yet forgettable) truth leads to some very distorted interpretations and evaluations. What bothers me in Invisible Listeners is that Vendler is inconsistent about whether the reader — as a poem's intended receiver — is central to her subject or not, and she seems not to notice the inconsistency. Her discussion of Herbert's intimate addresses to God/Christ includes several great poems which narrate episodes of interaction with God rather than presenting immediate addresses to Him. "The Collar" and "Love (III)" give accounts of interaction in the past; "A True Hymne" describes a recurrent interaction with God, reporting God's actions in third-person references. (Third person, yes; and who is the unnamed second person in these storytelling events? It is us.) When Herbert says "Love bade me welcome," and concludes the narrative with "So I did sit and eat", he is telling us a story, he's not telling Jesus; Jesus already knows the story, Jesus was there. Since Vendler has been at pains to define a kind of poem in which "this sort of intimacy springs from a fundamental loneliness, forcing the author to conjure up a listener unavailable in actual life" so that the poet "must hold a colloquy with an invisible other," you'd think she would need an emphatic decisive distinction between poems (like "The Quidditie" and "Love Unknown") where Herbert speaks to God and poems in which Herbert speaks about God speaking. But instead Vendler glides between the two sorts of poems without hesitation, as if all were equally instances of address-to-Invisible-Listener.

The effect is a beclouding of something important. Vendler hears "the quintessential Herbertian tone" of "intimate confiding" in the first line of "Love Unknown": "Deare Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad." The Friend in that poem turns out to be Jesus. However, fewer than half the poems in The Temple are directly addressed to God or Jesus (and some of those turn to address God or Jesus only at the end in a tone of reverent prayer). Of course we may say that God is understood to be implicitly an intended listener to any poem by this religious poet. But what I want to insist on is the other truth, that the human reader is always implied as an intended listener to any poem by a human poet. Vendler says of "Love Unknown," "Through Jesus' example here, Herbert offers us a model of how to listen to an intimate friend who is suffering." Herbert offers us — exactly. The reason why the first line of "Love Unknown" strikes "the quintessential Herbertian tone" is because Herbert makes us feel addressed in a candidly confidential way. Vendler writes, "Herbert conceives of his reader, I think, in terms of comparable intimacy, as the poems of The Temple say to us, in effect, 'Deare Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad.'" To which I want to reply Yes! and Aha! Because in this sentence Vendler has eloquently hit upon a crucial insight which ought to greatly complicate the notion of Invisible Listeners. The problem is that Vendler seems not to notice she has done so.

If we are addressed by Herbert with "comparable intimacy" then perhaps we too are, like Jesus, the poet's Invisible Listeners. If so, do we hold this privileged status by virtue of our being invisible, beyond the sphere of Herbert's social world? Do we qualify, in Vendler's terms, as Invisible Listeners because we exist in Herbert's distant future, nearly four hundred years after he writes? But to say so would be to suggest that Herbert felt a deep distinction between readers of his own day — persons whom he could imagine reading his poems during his lifetime or immediately after his death — and us in his distant future, and that the implication of this distinction would be that Herbert would aim his poems at us and not at his contemporaries due to some imaginative or spiritual inadequacy of those contemporaries. Such a suggestion might have a limited plausibility in the case of a bitterly frustrated and alienated poet, such a poet as Dickinson is often (misleadingly) portrayed to be; but in the case of Herbert it is preposterous. When the dying Herbert instructed Nicholas Ferrar to preserve The Temple if the poems would be helpful to "any dejected poor soul," Herbert did not have in mind only those of us who are spiritually needy in the 21^st century.

Poems seek readers. Poems are social acts in relation to anticipated readers.

To insist on that is not to deny that poems arise often out of loneliness, and always out of a sense of something drastically missing from the chatter and pragmatic communications and silences of our daily lives.

In her chapter on Whitman, Vendler suggests that his poetry moves from an early excitement about possible erotic companionship in the present to a later, disappointed sublimation whereby he imagines companionship with someone invisible in the future.

Only after the physical fails does Whitman become a poet of

intimacy with the invisible. Sometimes unable to secure, and

always unable to sustain, actual sexual intimacy, Whitman is

driven to invent an intimacy with the unseen; the poet is cast

toward the lover-in-futurity by the faithlessness of the

lover-in-the-present.

Vendler's chronological model here is probably not simply false, if we understand the point to be about a shift of emphasis rather than the decisive turn that Vendler's phrasing implies. But obviously in some of the Civil War poems Whitman is still yearning toward a listener in his actual present experience — see for instance "O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy". Conversely, Vendler cites passages from the 1855 version of "Song of Myself" as instances of Whitman speaking — already — to someone absent from quotidian experience. She quotes these lines: "This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody but I will tell you." — and she observes "he addresses his invisible listener . . . The poet's unseen confidant becomes one of an elect group, a group capable of infinite growth . . ."

If Whitman's alleged chronological turn from visible to invisible addressees is so easily shown to be an unreliable claim, why would Vendler hazard it? I think it's because she is so emotionally drawn to the idea of loneliness as a generating force for poetry that she is strongly tempted to posit relatively pure, desperate, hopeless versions of this motive. (This happens also in some of her memorably persuasive but determinedly bleak readings of Wallace Stevens.) Her wish to find Whitman in certain poems yearning for contact with an unreachable absent auditor leads her to ignore or dodge the basic complexity of the question To whom are poems addressed? The answer, I say, is that any poem — or let me say any serious poem — is always addressed both to readers in the present and to readers in the future. The serious poet — Herbert, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevens, Mandelstam — always hopes the poem will find at least a few rightly sensitive, sympathetic, insightful readers in his or her present world. (Whitman hoped for thousands; Dickinson counted on a chosen few, and had to imagine others.) Such readers may be geographically far away but they are not invisible in the sense Vendler defines. Some of them are friends or rivals or colleagues or critics, and some of them are felt to be "out there somewhere" in the poet's contemporary earthly reality. At the same time, the serious poet also always hopes the poem will reach the unseen sympathizer in ages hence, "the reader-in-futurity" (in Vendler's phrase). Poems are meant to be durable speech, speech built to last. Poems seek human readers both visible and invisible. Meanwhile, it can also be true of some poems that they address very specific listeners (explicitly addressed as "you" or "thou") who may be presently actual, even if hard to reach (Astrophel addressing Stella), or ontologically remote (Herbert addressing God, or Death). All of these attempted communications can be attempted with less or more of what Vendler calls "intimacy".

What I've said in the preceding paragraph might be called clumsy truisms, yet this sorting-out is necessary in order to clarify what Vendler has and hasn't done in Invisible Listeners. Insofar as she sticks with a firm definition of the kind of poems she sets up as her topic — (1) explicit address to the listener, (2) ontological unreachability of the listener, (3) personal warmth or intimacy in the address — the topic should remain quite narrow, with rather rare examples in Herbert or Whitman or any other poet. But Vendler wants the topic to be large, and this requires letting key words become fuzzy and unstable — "address," "invisible," "intimacy" — and also "colloquy," a word she uses where "dialogue" would not ring true, to mean utterance that evokes a sense of possible dialogue though only the poet is speaking. The fuzziness allows her to imply distinctions (between her selected poets and most other poets) and parallels (between Ashbery and either Whitman or Herbert) that don't finally convince.

There is no reason to deny that Vendler points rightly to "the reader-in-futurity" as Whitman's Invisible Listener in "Full of Life Now" and that Whitman's outreach here is eerie, eerily warm in its attempt to transcend time; you nearly feel his breath on your neck.

To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,

To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,

Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems,

Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and

become your comrade;

Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now

Vendler comments, "Yearning toward someone who may not be born for some years or even hundreds of years hence is, as we have seen from the examples of Hopkins and Dickinson, a feeling not uncommon in lyric, but Whitman carries it further than any poet before or since." Okay, but I want to say that what Whitman does in "Full of Life Now" is to give brash epitomizing blatancy to a motive intrinsic to all lyric, rather than merely "not uncommon in lyric".

Yet it would be ingenuously misleading to suggest that in writing and publishing "Full of Life Now" Whitman is not concerned with its effect on present readers as well as on future readers. A poet's yearning for human connection through poetry never confines itself only to readers whom it would be literally impossible for the poet to meet on earth. That's why what Whitman does in poems like "To a Stranger" is to give naked epitomizing blatancy to a motive as intrinsic to all lyric as the motive to attract posterity's interest.

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you, . . .

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Here, manifestly addressing someone imagined to be alive in Whitman's New York, Whitman has the nerve to crystallize a message that every poem addresses (albeit less wetly, less alarmingly) to those of the poet's contemporaries who will have the sensitivity to listen.

In arguing that poems always imply both present and future human addressees, I don't want to smudge the fact that a poem may press especially toward one or the other. "To a Stranger" tilts toward present readers; "Full of Life Now" tilts toward future readers. Whitman's most compelling address to the reader-in-futurity is in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and Vendler devotes several good pages to this inexhaustibly great poem. Rather than belabor my point that "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is also aimed at New Yorkers and other Americans of 1856 ("Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you"), in this case what I want to question is Vendler's emphasis on Whitman's sexual longing. Having organized her topic with a stress on intimacy, and having emphasized Whitman's great wishful power to evoke erotic companionship and sexual intimacy, Vendler colors Whitman's address to a future listener with sexual desire, whereas the poet's imaginative relation to later generations in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is wider, more generous and complex than sexual desire; I think it's slightly condescending to Whitman to imply that what animates his imagining of future passengers across the river is sexual fantasy. Maybe Vendler's term "intimacy" promoted this dubious implication; though of course intimacy does not have to be sexual, as Vendler indeed notes in her chapter on Herbert.

Despite all the above objections, Vendler should get credit for showing a tenuous but interesting similarity between Herbert's warm addresses to God and Whitman's warm addresses to us. What about the third star in her trio?

Herbert, Whitman . . . and Ashbery? I think one impulse behind a roster like this is the impulse to reject the idea that we have no great poets in English since Yeats, Frost, Stevens and Eliot. Appraising the generation of poets after them, you can make the case for Auden, or Bishop, or Lowell; I've often wanted to make the case for Jarrell; cases are made for various poets born in the late Twenties (Ashbery's generation). But I think if you have a deeply informed sense of the greatness of Yeats, Frost, Stevens, and Eliot, then there has to be a nervous strain, a tense misgiving involved in your effort to locate comparable greatness in a poet whose work has appeared since, say, 1940. Like Vendler, I love the idea of greatness, and I'm repulsed by the notion that in some politically salubrious way we have outgrown the idea of greatness. Surely, surely with so many of us — hundreds and hundreds of poets! — working so hard and publishing so much in these decades — Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and passionately onward — surely someone must be great? Well, maybe. Time will tell. The truest assessment will be made (I hope) by readers in the mid-21^st century and beyond (if megacapitalism still allows a few thousand citizens to focus their careers and inner lives on poetry). But I don't want to kid myself, and I'm wary of coronations. To my mind, several of my own mentors and friends are among the more plausible candidates if we look for greatness emerging today. Much remains to be seen. But perhaps a critic who has a genius for recognizing and advocating greatness in poets of the past — a critic like Vendler, or Harold Bloom — and who moves among all the well-known poets of the day — such a critic may feel an irresistible urge to nominate a living poet as great, or nearly so, or at least to discuss the living and the great dead in similarly appreciative terms. The equipment cries out to be used. One result is clusters like "Herbert, Whitman and Ashbery". No living poet has benefited more than Ashbery from our craving for greatness in the present.

How does Ashbery get into a book about poems that intimately address a listener who is imagined as a beloved companion? His ticket is a single poem, one of his most famous, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". Vendler calls it a "poem of colloquy". She writes about it as if it were splendidly coherent, and as if the essence of this coherence were Ashbery's imagining of friendly relation with Francesco Parmigianino, the 16^th-century artist who painted the painting that inspired the poem. There are in fact five spots in this seventeen-page poem where Ashbery directly addresses the painter, on a first-name basis. There are also long passages in which Parmigianino is referred to in the third person, and even longer passages in which Ashbery meditates on, or metaphorically evokes (and evokes and evokes) the gap between one's experience and any representation of that experience. If a good Italian translation of this poem could be handed across the centuries to Parmigianino, I wonder if he would feel intimately addressed by it? Well, Vendler prompts us to hear the friendly tone of artist-to-artist comradeship in the "Francesco" passages. She finds that the painting has

fostered the solacing illusion of direct communication between

a dead artist and a living viewer, so much so as to compel the

American beholder to think of the artist not as the dead art-

historical "Parmigianino" but as a kindred spirit, the "Francesco"

who forsook mimetic realism — in the crucial presentation of his

own body in a self-portrait — for a candid acknowledgment of the

distorting optics of every enabling aesthetic.

To say that I find this only mildly convincing is not to say that I have an interestingly different interpretation of the poem. I can't bear to seek one, I don't want to wade any longer in those seventeen pages which, all in all, give me the blur-buzz sensation which has been Ashbery's main offering for decades and decades, and of which he is not only the supreme purveyor but also the supreme describer:

You are allowing extraneous matters

To break up your day, cloud the focus

Of the crystal ball. Its scene drifts away

Like vapor scattered on the wind. The fertile

Thought-associations that until now came

So easily, appear no more, or rarely. Their

Colorings are less intense, washed out

By autumn rains and winds, spoiled, muddied,

Given back to you because they are worthless.

That's well said, though it doesn't awaken in me a craving to hear the same feeling expressed hundreds of different ways. Oh Francesco, I mean John, must the blur-buzz always paralyze us?

Rather than struggle with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," now I just want to remind us of what has often been noted, that the poem is — notwithstanding my remarks about blur-buzz — actually extremely uncharacteristic of Ashbery's poetry, as he has readily acknowledged in interviews, precisely because it deviates so much from his mainstream of extraneous vapors. (As Larissa MacFarquhar says in her New Yorker profile of Ashbery, "he finds its essayistic structure alien to the rest of his work.") To some extent "Self-Portrait" does present an evolving meditation on art and life; the poem thinks in front of us — very different from ladling out a comic pastiche that imitates the sounds and gestures of thinking. The poem's thinking could perhaps be more clear without loss of beauty, but it is there, and not just in teasing eruptions. Whereas the vast majority of Ashbery's poems refuse to sustain thinking. "Self-Portrait" is an anomaly in his oeuvre. And insofar as it is addressed caringly to an identified individual Other ("Francesco"), the poem is doubly un-Ashberian.

To admit that, though, would be to highlight the flimsiness of Ashbery's inclusion alongside Herbert and Whitman. Instead, Vendler needs something besides the Francesco cordiality to justify putting Ashbery at third base in her All-Star infield. She discovers another invisible listener for him. Guess who? The reader!

Excuse me? Yes, the reader — not "in futurity" but you and me, today. But wait — are we invisible? Well, we don't attend certain parties in New York . . . But in Vendler's Ashbery chapter the criterion of invisibility disappears from the program (except as regards dear Francesco who has been dead so very long) — and yet the phrase "invisible listener" doesn't disappear, because after all, it's what the book is supposedly about. Vendler jettisons the focus on listeners who are ontologically out of reach without acknowledging that she is doing so. If The Reader is the kind of Listener we're talking about, then every poet belongs equally in the discussion, no?

(You might suppose at this point that explicit direct address to the reader, as in Jonson's "Epitaph on Salomon Pavy," or as in Frost's poem "Not Quite Social," would become the key criterion; Vendler invokes Ashbery's riddling poem "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" as an example. But she wants to make a much wider claim about his relation to the reader.)

The claim is that Ashbery's relation to the reader is wonderfully special; "many of his poems are acutely conscious" of the reader. Vendler declares that Ashbery solves the problem of how the lyric poem can "summon into its solitary precinct a sense of our changing society at large, so as to make us, as readers, intimate not only with the author as a private fellow-sufferer but also with his social predicaments (and therefore, by implication, with our own)". He solves this problem, she says, "by his enormous lexical range". In other words, because Ashbery freely tosses anything and everything into the Rio Grande of his poetry, and because he leaves it up to us to make sense of it by tremendous exertions of wit ("the loop of co-creation between Ashbery and his reader is indispensable if the reader is to follow and understand his poetry"), Ashbery speaks to us intimately — kind of like Herbert addressing his "Sweetest Saviour".

To me that all seems utter balderdash. I don't mean that Vendler is insincere. Rather I think she is trapped in the goo of an attraction she committed herself to in the Seventies and has been unwilling to stop justifying ever since.

Speaking of goo traps, I warn myself now not to try to tackle the entire old issue of Ashbery's alleged meaningfulness here. Whenever I imagine writing about Ashbery, the word that comes to mind is quagmire: my troops will go in there, get stuck fighting from street to street, win a series of useless skirmishes while suffering endless ambushes, and by the time I concoct an exit strategy we'll be bedraggled and embarrassed even if God was on our side. (Don't push the metaphor, I'm not Rumsfeld! Ashbery and Vendler are both imperial powers compared to my pesky insurgency.)

Let me say that seldom have I felt less intimately addressed than by Ashbery's poetry. The waiter or waitress telling me about today's polenta dish feels more intimate. In principle I have to grant that Ashbery's poems are addressed (in the sense I emphasized earlier in this essay) to the reader, to us, as all poems are, but among all the poets I've read extensively, Ashbery is the one who least gives me the sense of a serious effort to communicate, to tell me something he wants me to grasp. Every good lyric poem gives you the feeling of someone looking you in the eyes and trying to reach you. (Often by telling it slant, yes — to reach you in that way, as Dickinson does — success in circuit lies.) (I respect John Stuart Mill but he was wrong in his oft-quoted assertion that the lyric poem should be thought of as speech overheard.) Instead, reading Ashbery in quantity is like listening to a witty Portuguese gentleman who has ingested a loquacity drug and (glancing at you very rarely) talks to you all day in Portuguese, a language you studied briefly many years ago . . .

Oh, but there are blips of English amid the po-mo Portuguese. Ashbery is brilliant, and every few pages he throws a gleamy fish to the credulous reader who hungers for Meaning. Usually these morsels amount to generalizations about his basic sense of life as chaotic flow. Vendler has shown many times over the years that a passage of five or eight lines here or there, lifted out of the Ashberian floodage, expresses a curl of wry insight or sly parody or recognizable emotion with panache and even grace. What she cannot show — because even to attempt it would be utterly exhausting, and would lead only into a wilderness in which anything always has an endless exfoliating array of metaphorical "meanings" — is that her selected passages come at importantly right moments in structures (poems) whose elements all contribute purposefully and satisfyingly to an accumulated meaning larger than that of the enjoyably graspable passage.

Ashbery thus (in eight out of nine poems) fails a test which has been beautifully passed — as Vendler has deftly demonstrated — by every great or near-great poet she has ever praised; yet in Ashbery this failure seems to Vendler not only excusable but somehow commendable. 'Tis strange.

One of the very few Ashbery poems Vendler invokes specifically in Invisible Listeners (besides "Self-Portrait") is "Grand Galop" (like "Self-Portrait," it dates from the mid-Seventies, fourteen Ashbery books ago; you could almost suspect that Vendler hasn't detected any irresistible intimacies in recent Ashbery). From this poem of 162 lines Vendler quotes six lines, to illustrate how the poem is a "history of emotional life". I won't argue with her take on those six lines (must dodge quagmire!); I note, though, that the passage she selects, seven pages into the poem, is kicked off by this line which she doesn't quote: "Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him." And a few lines after the selected passage come these lines:

It seems only yesterday that we saw

The movie with the cows in it

And turned to one at your side, who burped

As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose

Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.

Now, if you paid me enough I would explain how this contributes to a history of emotional life, not just Ashbery's but yours (you pulled some weird all-nighters near the end of twelfth grade, didn't you?); but I wouldn't believe it. (As for that hog, well, we are all as baffled by life as a squealing farm animal — see?)

Vendler knows better than to attempt a complete paraphrase-and-explication of a long thing like "Grand Galop" (she smells a quagmire, perhaps). She'd have to make a case for these lines early in the poem:

Drops from an air conditioner

On those who pass underneath. It's one of the sights of our town.

Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit. One who comes

Walking dog on leash is distant to say how all this

Changes the minute to an hour . . .

Do you feel the intimacy?

Maybe there could be a way to argue that Ashbery's poetry is "intimate" with us without arguing that it makes sense — without arguing, that is, that the poems as purposeful coherent wholes convey particular meanings about life. (By particular I mean any meanings more specific than Ashbery's Ur-meaning of our endless befuddlement.) You'd have to argue that the intimacy transcends any meaning expressible in statements — as if, say, that Portuguese gentleman were endlessly nuzzling your ear, or as if he had become a murmur inside your head. But Vendler doesn't want to celebrate Ashbery in any such gaga way. She has never joined the postmodern chorus that thanks Ashbery for showing how we can never really say or understand anything. What's so strange, and in a way touching, is that Vendler has persisted in praising Ashbery as if he were a poet basically like Herbert or Whitman or all the other poets who make earnest, urgent, paraphrasable declarations about life. (Such declarations are not the same as what Vendler has called — propping up a straw adversary for Ashbery — "the expository flatness of the assertion of doctrine or ideology".)

Vendler's critical practice everywhere implies what I believe to be true, that every good poem can be paraphrased. If the poem is difficult or deep, or both, the paraphrase will need to be much longer than the poem, and will always feel somehow flat and dreary and reductive next to the poem — that's why we wanted the poem! But still you can say to someone, "Here's what I think the poem means" — you can put it into words, and what you say will be different from what you'd say about any other poem. When you encounter a wonderful poem, awed silence may be a right initial response; but then it wants to be talked about, and a necessary part of that talk is the paraphrasing.

I agree with Vendler (and every other good critic) on that; and if an enflamed line were to be drawn between formalist explicators and postmodernist blur-buzz boosters, I'd be on Vendler's side of that line. But Ashbery is a poet for the other side. Vendler's desire to claim him for our side goes way back; in her long essay on him in her 1988 book The Music of What Happens, Vendler does some very selective paraphrasing and then stakes out her bold position: "I have been extracting chiefly the more accessible parts of Ashbery, but it is possible to explain his 'hard' parts, too, given time, patience, and an acquaintance with his manner." And a few pages later she notes that Ashbery gets called a surrealist: "But surrealism cannot be parsed into sense, and Ashbery can — a process one finds laborious at first, but then increasingly natural, as one gets the hang of it (if my own experience is typical)."

That position, set forth in 1988 and still unretracted (many Ashbery books later), is some mixture of credulous wishfulness and professorial bluffing. (If we don't understand Ashbery, sentence by sentence, it must be because we haven't tried as hard as Vendler has?) It has led her into advocacy for Ashbery that is quixotically inappropriate. Larissa MacFarquhar (The New Yorker, November 7, 2005) bases the following on conversations with Ashbery:

he's trying to cultivate a different sort of attention: not focused,

straight-ahead scrutiny but something more like a glance out of

the corner of your eye that catches something bright and twitching

that you then can't identify when you turn to look. This sort of

indirect, half-conscious attention is actually harder to summon up

on purpose than the usual kind, in the way that free-associating out

loud is harder than speaking in an ordinary logical manner. A person

reading or hearing his language automatically tries to make sense of it:

sense, not sound, is our default setting. Resisting the impulse to make

sense, allowing sentences to accumulate into an abstract collage of

meaning rather than a story or an argument, requires effort. But that

collage — a poem that cannot be paraphrased or explained or "unpacked" —

is what Ashbery is after.

The meaning of the word "meaning" in the phrase "abstract collage of meaning" is an elusive elixir; it would have to be "the sensation that something very literary and suave is going on without any strings attached and nothing to worry about." The issue of Ashbery's meaningfulness is not identical with the issue raised by Invisible Listeners of his alleged intimate, caring relation with the reader; yet the two issues are deeply related in Vendler's mind — and in my mind as well. If someone cares about you, how can he or she use language in ways that show and enact this caring? Well, I guess someone could entertain you with nonsense; the Lewis Carroll of "Jabberwocky" seems to me appealingly affectionate. Apart from mere entertainment, though, human caring in language will show itself in rich and vigorous offerings of meaning; such offerings may be discursive, or they may be fabulously metaphorical; they may be mysterious because the truth they pursue is mysterious; but they invite understanding.

Reviewing Ashbery's most recent (till next month or so?) book Where Shall I Wander (in The New Republic, March 7, 2005), Vendler gamely stays on the horse: "I have offered these synopses to show that Ashbery does make sense if we can tune our mind to his wavelength — something I am not always able to do, but which is exhilarating when that precarious harmony of minds is reached." She is honest enough to admit that some of the new poems puzzle her — "But I remind myself that time brings about not only the fading of failed experiments but also the wonderful clarification of passages that were perplexing on first appearance."

Posterity will care enough to judge, I hope. Which brings me to an odd thing: Invisible Listeners has very few endnotes, but I'm in one of them! I guess I should feel honored, and yet — something is a little off. In the endnote, Vendler is mentioning, in order to set it aside, the complaint that poets don't deal enough with issues of social injustice. She cites me as someone who has objected to "the presumed poverty of social reference of the lyric". This must allude to my book Stevens and the Interpersonal (1991), in which I argued that the value of Stevens' poetry is limited (not spoiled) by his chaste avoidance of all problems involving difference between persons. Vendler may think my approach was naive in some ways, and she might be right. Also in that book, though, I argued at length that Stevens is admirably respectful and helpful and sociable (even if not "intimate") in relation to the reader; and I developed this argument through an extended contrast between Stevens and Ashbery, including challenges to Vendler's view of Ashbery. (I'm not sure I'm glad to find myself paddling in the same teapot fifteen years later.) If room was going to be made in Invisible Listeners for an endnote citing Halliday, of all people, you'd think the focus would be this Stevens/Ashbery discussion. Instead, Vendler's endnote, without actually mentioning my book on Stevens, quotes from an interview (in The Writer's Chronicle, February 2002) in which I speculated on posterity's view of Ashbery: