Literary Titans Clash

In the staid world of poetry, where words can be weapons, two of its biggest guns appear to have engaged in battle. Porter University Professor Helen Vendler has challenged Alice Quinn, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, over her release of previously unpublished poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, calling the manner of Quinn’s editing and publication “reprehensible.”

According to The New York Times, Vendler’s scathing review of “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments” in the April 3 issue of The New Republic marks a “literary clash of titans.”

“The real poems will outlast these, their maimed and stunted siblings,” Vendler wrote about this new collection which contains over 100 poems, drafts, and fragments. Bishop, who taught at Harvard from 1970 to 1977, published less than 90 poems in six collections during her lifetime.

Vendler’s voice of criticism, while loud, has been mostly alone. Writing in The New Criterion, William Logan, a poet and professor at the University of Florida, noted that “readers will be grateful to find the best of this raw material gathered by Alice Quinn.” David Orr, a poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, declared that “the publication…isn’t just a significant event in our poetry, it’s part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.”

Born in Worcester, Mass., Bishop was also a resident of Key West, New York, Boston, and Brazil, where she lived for 16 years with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop’s life was one plagued with tragedy: her father died before her birth, a boyfriend committed suicide leaving her with a postcard, “Go to hell, Elizabeth,” and de Macedo Soares died by overdose.

A close friend of confessional poet Robert Lowell, Bishop abstained from his personal, intimate style, preferring a more guarded approach to writing despite her various hardships. She was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, but her reputation has grown since her death, according to Orr.

“Readers adore Bishop and adore themselves for adoring her,” Logan wrote.

“Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified ‘No,’” Vendler wrote.

Louise Glück, former poet laureate of the United States, told an audience at Harvard Hillel last night that she was encouraged as a young poet reading the unpolished works of poets like William Butler Yeats.

Vendler’s assertions are not only being challenged by fellow poetry critics but by at least one member of her own English and American Literature Department. “I don’t believe that [an] author’s intentions are all that matters or that finished poems are the only poems that ought to interest us,” Professor of English and American Literature Elisa New wrote in an e-mail.

“Or even that ‘good’ poems are the only poems that ought to interest us.”

New, who has yet to read the new Bishop book, added that “we would only have 12 published Dickinson poems if this were the case. Instead we have nearly 2,000—some good, some not so good. I’m glad to have them.”

“The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ as a poet. This book is not,” Vendler writes.

According to New, it’s important to save the work of the poet who once wrote that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

“The fact that Bishop’s poems will survive into an age with different canons of taste and analysis makes me glad that we’ll have more of her to read,” she wrote.

Vendler, who is on sabbatical this year, could not be reached for comment.

—Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.