The critic is the only artist who depends entirely upon another art form, which means that part of his job is to determine the nature of that relationship. Should he be an advocate? A policeman? A curator? A hanging judge? A mostly loyal but occasionally snippy personal assistant? The decision is an unconscious one, perhaps, but once it's made, the critic's writing will be colored by his chosen role in the same way that our voices carry the accents of our birthplaces. Helen Vendler is one of the most powerful poetry critics of our time, and her relationship with her art is as simple as it is peculiar: she's a steward. If contemporary poetry were a great manor house, Vendler would be its long-serving and unshakable manager, monitoring the stable hands, preventing the chambermaids from swiping the jewelry and, above all, keeping immaculate the high chambers to which the lords and ladies retire at nightfall. It's an unusual position — unlike Vendler, most poetry critics are poets themselves — and it comes with its own curious set of virtues and vices. On one hand, Vendler is an astonishingly thorough and patient reader whose devotion has influenced the way we read Herbert, Shakespeare, Stevens and many others. On the other hand, her work occasionally demonstrates the flaws that come from feeling that one is obligated to ensure the Right Poets are read the Right Way. W. B. Yeats is, of course, one of the Rightest Poets imaginable. Vendler's new book, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, is an attempt to explain, as she puts it, “the inner and outer formal choices Yeats made, the cultural significance his forms bore for him,” and “the way his forms ... became the material body of his thoughts and emotions.” That's no small task: Yeats was a technician's technician whose massive output is a blizzard of stanza shapes and metrical variations. Fortunately, Vendler relishes the nitty-gritty of douzains and dizains, and the result is a meticulous, enlightening and strangely flawed study that adds plenty to the Yeats canon. If you're looking for a general introduction to the poet, this isn't the book for you (it's 425 pages and drier than chalk dust), but scholars will find years of material here. Vendler's method is straightforward: each chapter takes up one of Yeats's potential formal quandaries — the Byzantium poems, the sonnets, the sequences and so forth — and then attempts to determine why and how Yeats made the technical choices that he did, often with helpful reference to biographical or historical facts. The results can be impressive. Vendler is especially persuasive when tracing the evolution of a poem; one of the book's first studies is a detailed analysis of “After Long Silence” in which Vendler carefully walks us through Yeats's development of the poem, in particular the lines “Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, / The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night.” She's also very good at explaining what different forms meant to Yeats. In her discussion of the 12-poem sequence “Supernatural Songs,” for instance, Vendler notes that the sequence ends with a Shakespearean sonnet that seems at odds with the more primitive forms that precede it. But for Yeats, as she explains, the sonnet represents an ultimate refinement of artistic poise, making it the perfect vehicle to reflect the tension between ascetic life and sexual life that animates the entire sequence. It's an intriguing, well-argued point. Yet while there's much to admire in “Our Secret Discipline,” there's also much to question (aside from the inadvertently whips-and-cuffs title). In general, the problems stem from the same source: Vendler treats poems as if their elements could be isolated and measured for expressiveness. For instance, she argues on several occasions that a particular form is ideal because when the poem is “recast” in another form, it sounds “off.” So she offers a version of “Easter 1916” in tetrameter quatrains (“I have met them at close of every day / Coming abroad with vivid faces”), and then claims that “we recognize the contrast between the rapidity and intensity of the trimeter quick-march ... and the more sedulous and deliberate step of such tetrameters.” Well, maybe. But it's more likely that we “recognize the contrast” simply because we're familiar with Yeats's poem as it currently exists (and of course, had Yeats wanted to express the same concepts in tetrameter, he'd likely have used completely different words). Along the same lines, Vendler repeatedly commits variations on what has been called the “enactment fallacy.” Basically, this is the assignment of meaning to technical aspects of poetry that those aspects don't necessarily possess. For example, in an otherwise excellent discussion of Yeats's use of ottava rima (a type of eight-line stanza), Vendler attributes great effect to “the pacing” allegedly created by “a fierce set of enjambments” followed by a “violent drop” in the fourth stanza of the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Here's the stanza in question: Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. “With each new verbal or participial theater of action of the stanza, there arrives a new agent,” Vendler writes, “making the clauses scramble helter-skelter, one after the other. The headlong pace is crucial.” Since the stanza involves words like “dragon,” “nightmare,” “murdered,” “blood” and “fighting,” it's easy to see what she's thinking here. But to make a more modest use of Vendler's rewriting trick above, what if we kept the same enjambments, syntax, rhyme scheme and basic rhythm — yet changed some of the words? We might get this (my words, with apologies to I. A. Richards for adapting one of his tactics): Now days are slow and easy, the summer Sighs into fall: a purring bumble-bee Can leave the flower, softened to a blur, To soak in the noon sun, and fly carefree; The night can breathe with pleasure as once more We weave our visions into poetry And seek to bring our thoughts under a rule, Who are the mindful servants of the soul. Not so “helter-skelter” now, is it? In a book review or essay, committing this particular fallacy is a minor error. Most critics do it regularly (I certainly have). In a book that sets out to explain why a poet makes particular formal choices, however, the mistake is more serious, because it replaces the complex relationships among a poem's elements with just-so stories in which it always turns out — surprise! — that meaning has been mirrored by shape and sound. Think of it this way: we don't enjoy a bowl of gumbo because it “feels” exactly the way it “tastes”; rather, we find the combination of “taste” and “feel” pleasing. Similarly, a particular stanza arrangement can reinforce our experience of a poem, but only because that arrangement is working in harmony with the poem's other aspects. If “Our Secret Discipline” isn't as strong as it could be, it's because Vendler has thought deeply about Yeats's use of form, but not about form apart from Yeats. And this isn't surprising, really. Her great strength has always been her close reading of individual poets. If that causes her occasionally to find correspondences that don't exist, well, what steward hasn't wanted to find a world perfected in the venerable stones of the master's great house? - NYT __
