Helen Vendler: Our Necessary Angel

When I sent her essay to potential contributors to serve as a model, one responded, no doubt as a backhanded compliment, "If this is what we're supposed to do, I might as well be teaching auto mechanics." [...]convinced is Vendler that poetry is art, and not something else, that smack in the middle of the rage for theory in the 1980s she published Words Chosen Out of Desire, a landmark study that serves as a corrective to misreadings of Stevens as aloof, cerebral, and impersonal. Calling Stevens a second-order poet (for he reveals the intensity of first-order experience by finding a symbol adequate to its passion), she exposes the rawness of hurt, the despair of disappointment, or the occasional ecstasy of desire that pulsates beneath the surface.