LIBRARY NOTES
 
Helen Vendler
Lyric Poetry and Shakespeare's Sonnets
Thursday, February 26, 1998 at 6:30 PM
Temple Israel, 112 East 75th Street; $15 per person
"How do ideas take on lyric form? How does someone who wants to portray social corruption, for instance, make a convincingly broad canvas within fourteen lines? How does someone find models to distinguish the aging of the body from that of the mind and that of the heart? In what way can the poet suggest, with lyric feeling, a rivalry between the Platonic triad (the Good, the True, and the Beautiful) and the Christian Trinity? "
I will discuss the way moral ideas are symbolized in lyric poems, using the example of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The Sonnets deserve detailed and particular commentary because they comprise a virtual anthology of lyric possibility -- in the poet's choice of subgenres, in arrangements of words, in tone, in dramatic modeling of the inner life, in speech-acts.
To arrive at these understanding, I found it necessary to learn the Sonnets by heart. I would often think I 'knew' a sonnet; but then scanning it in memory, I would find lacunae. The recovery of the missing pieces always brought with it a further understand of the design of that sonnet and made me aware of what I had not initially perceived about the function of those words. No pianist or violinist would omit to learn a sonata by heart before interpreting it in public performance, but the equal habit of knowing poetry by heart before interpreting it has been lost. I first memorized many of the sonnets in the heartfelt way of youth, and I hope I have not lost that 'heartfelt' sense of the poems. But I have since learned to love in a more conscious way Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical, imaginative intent.
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Her most recent book,
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, was published by Harvard University Press in November. Arion Press has published a 196-page, hand-printed, hand-bound edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, introduced and edited by Dr. Vendler and limited to 200 numbered copies. Dr. Vendler's previous book with Harvard University Press,
Part of Nature, Part of US: Modern American Poetry, won the National Book Critics Award. Her other books include
Soul Says: On Recent Poetry;
The Odes of John Keats; The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham; and
The Given and The Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition.
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