Scott Newstok: Helen Vendler and the Art of Mentoring
Like all great mentors, the visionary poetry critic and professor helped me to understand my own architecture better.
By Scott Newstok
Among the pantheon of teachers who’ve graced my life, Helen Vendler was the latest to fall. It was perhaps fitting that she passed away last April 23, the same date as Shakespeare’s death, for she was almost universally regarded as our finest critic of poetry, and had written a landmark book on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Many of her obituaries noted that she “adhered to the old-fashioned method of close reading” (The New York Times), some going so far as to laud her as “the closest of close readers” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Though there’s no disputing her singular attention to verbal pyrotechnics, whether she was unloading the ore from every rift of Keats’s odes or bringing her daunting learning to bear upon today’s poets, what stands out to me is her mentoring—and how her unique approach to reading informed it.
I was her student at Harvard University. Like many others, I initially found her intel…
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