Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

Helen Vendler's Popular Quotes

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

- Helen Vendler

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

- Helen Vendler

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

- Helen Vendler

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

- Helen Vendler

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

- Helen Vendler

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

- Helen Vendler

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings to…

- Helen Vendler

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

- Helen Vendler

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

- Helen Vendler