Helen Vendler (1933–2024)
The New York Times obituary begins: “In the poetry marketplace, her praise had reputation-making power, while her disapproval could be withering.” I find it hard to imagine that anyone who spent a lifetime reading and writing about poetry would appreciate such a summary of her work.
“Frost” and Frost
I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.
Helen Keller’s sources
The New York Review Books volume of Helen Keller’s writing, The World I Live In (2012), has a few pages of notes identifying sources for quoted material, but many such passages are left unidentified. Having looked up the unidentified bits in Keller’s prose (thank you, Google Books), I thought it appropriate to share them here, for anyone who might looking. They reflect a great breadth of reading and are someimes quoted imperfectly, from memory perhaps, or from a faulty source.
“To err is human”
A passage from page 87 of Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision is getting considerable attetion: “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.‘” Actually, it’s “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” But to err is human.
Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry
1983: “If you could accurately enter your whole life into a computer without leaving the minutest fact out, then the computer could possess a chance of becoming artistic. But even then the computer would have to be considered the protégé of its programmer. For now, computers may be profitably used as electronic thesauri, as servants to the new craft of electronic poetry-writing. As far as the art of poetry is concerned, computers will have to wait.” Still true.