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

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

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

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

- 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

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

- 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