The Private Language of Form

Is there any critic more thorough than Helen Vendler? Her relentless, painstakingly evidenced argumentation may be found not only in her more sustained, more specialized efforts — from "On Extended Wings" (1969), her first study of Wallace Stevens, to "Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery" (2005) — but also in her criticism in the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Ms. Vendler's academic background, in other words, is always visible — as is her devotion to and love of poetry in English — in whatever she writes. Her carefulness, her attention to minutiae, is a rare quality, particularly when set against the current mores of poetry criticism, which, for all its highly technical vocabulary, has been for many years an enterprise largely impressionistic.

Ms. Vendler laudably refuses to discard the monumental figures of English poetry — and, more important, refuses to reshape them, as Christian historians did to the intractable titans of the Hebrew Bible, solely as augurs and forerunners of our current condition. Any serious reader of English poetry should be delighted that, in "Our Secret Discipline" (Belknap Press, 428 pages, $35), she has turned her attention to the question of form in W.B. Yeats's poetry. (The poet, or rather his later plays, was the subject of Ms. Vendler's dissertation.) Yeats is a particularly thorny figure for well-meaning rehabilitators: His eccentric political and religious beliefs, never very clearly separated, and the powerful role of premodern myths and theological systems in his lexicon of metaphor make him a difficult creature to claim as an ancestor of contemporary poetry.

Ms. Vendler's basic contention seems undeniable, even self-evident: that the creation of form for Yeats was just as heroic a struggle as his attempt to create a private language divorced from the political and commercial meanness of his epoch. But she pursues this idea doggedly, descending from generality into a series of penetrating illuminations of the intricacies of Yeats's quest, and his suffering in undertaking it.

Ms. Vendler's chapter on Yeats's encounter with the sonnet (appropriately called "Troubling the Tradition") offers a persuasive and compact illustration of her thesis, comparing Yeats's first published sonnet "Remembrance" to his last, the bizarre, searing "High Talk," a poem structured as the confession of a wild, clownish, frightening stilt maker named Malachi:

"High Talk," by means of its forms "run wild," voices Yeats's view that that the "high" rhetoric of the sonnet tradition has collapsed... We understand Yeats's cultural commentary here only if we see Malachi's apocalyptic images, his primitive couplets, his aberrant prosody, and his exultant despair as the formal ruination of the courtly European sonnet by a new primitivism.

Ms. Vendler is typically accurate in her reading of "High Talk." The only real criticism I have is that, even in a book devoted to the topic of form, she puts too little emphasis on the cultural-political side of the issue. If "the ruination of the courtly European sonnet" is indeed a commentary on the collapse of European culture, Ms. Vendler might have mentioned some of the historical elements of that collapse, even glancingly.

Ms. Vendler's approach to the various other forms — whole, fractured, and hybrid — that fascinated Yeats is much the same, identifying the place of each in his larger poetic vision, in his understanding of the specific capacities and weaknesses of each. She points out (rightly) that the trimeter quatrain is for Yeats the "vehicle par excellence" of his nationalism, for example, and argues (again rightly) that if we wish to divine what we can of Yeats's obscure personal theology, we should look to his blank verse, particularly to his explicit vision of apocalypse, "The Second Coming."

Ms. Vendler's eye is no less acute when she turns to close readings. Her book's second chapter, "Antechamber and Afterlife," is a near microscopic examination of form poems: "Sailing to Byzantium," "Byzantium," "The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus," and "News for the Delphic Oracle." The second and fourth poems are, as is easy to see, reworkings and continuations of the first and third. But Ms. Vendler shows, in examining the hidden formal movements of each poem — particularly by dissecting the organization of the stanzas — that their simultaneous continuity and struggle with each other, and the vision of the conflict between the temporal and the eternal they propose, are far more than just a matter of theory. The promised escape from time that "Sailing to Byzantium" offers, with its plea for the poet to be gathered into the "artifice of eternity," is undone by the ceaselessly flowing "blood and mire" that "Byzantium" suggests is our final condition. And the Dionysiac sexual congress that ends "News for the Delphic Oracle" retracts the locked, still afterlife envisioned in "The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus." She concludes her examination by noting that "Yeats's forms, as portals to the poem's core, necessarily equal (or in some cases surpass) the 'ideas' on which they confer such unforgettable shapes."

While that statement may seem rather anodyne, it's the summation of a long and careful process of reading, admirable for its fidelity to the text. But it does, nonetheless, suggest where this engaging and useful book's greatest flaw lies: In the end, "Our Secret Discipline" is most concerned with its own internal and limited argument. The final chapter of "Our Secret Discipline" is a compendium of what Ms. Vendler calls "rare forms," the forms in Yeats that have no exact analogue in the tradition of European meter. Her discussion of these feels rushed, even cursory, especially in contrast to the slow pace of the rest of the book. And it prompts the reader to ask: Aren't the "rare forms" precisely those that any student of poetry must be interested in first and foremost? The unquantifiable, the eccentric, the sui generis? Ms. Vendler's book stumbles here. But it moves so surely and efficiently elsewhere that this slip is not finally damning — whatever Yeats himself, the high priest of the esoteric, would have made of it.

Mr. Munson is the online editor of Commentary. He last wrote for these pages on e.e. cummings.