Harvard poetry scholar Helen Vendler delivered the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription access only), argued that, "A humanities education should focus on language, literature, and the arts, not on history and philosophy...."
Observation #1: Helen Vendler's ex-husband (now deceased) is the philosopher Zeno Vendler.
Observation #2: Yes, observation #1 is a genuine ad hominem.
Observation #3: "In her speech, Ms. Vendler, a prolific poetry critic, argued that the arts teach students more about humanity and their national heritage than either philosophy or history, offering them a truer portrayal of 'the way we are and were, the way we actually live and have lived.'" This may, indeed, be true, but I wonder whether it isn't the wrong basis on which to argue for the value of literature. (Note: the full text of the lecture is here. Thanks to Michael Madison [Pittsburgh Law] for the link.)
UPDATE: A poet, who shall remain anonymous, writes: "I never liked Vendler. She 'reigns' over poetry criticism in an almost authoritarian manner and has given her imprimatur to Jorie Graham who, as you know, is a poet I find an overrated dilletante. As to poets giving insight into life (or whatever the words are), I have been struck time and again at how plain dumb sentimental religious ('spiritual') so many well-regarded poets are. Do they understand life, humanity? Through a glass barely. People like Vendler live in a political vacuum and worship purity and refinement of sensibility which is fine if joined with social responsibility and authentic concern for the victims of injustice. Harvard is not, in my view, a good place for anything but a Philistinism of caring (Graham, by the way, has joined Vendler at Harvard)." Philosophers may get some amusement some time by looking at Jorie Graham's dabbling in philosophical themes; she's not only a bad poet, but a pretentious one as well.
Here's what actually happens, by the way, when poets dare to give insight in to our "national heritage." And here's an explanation of the poetry industry that produces irrelevant poseurs like Jorie Graham.
FURTHER UPDATE: And here's a priceless review of Jorie Graham by William Logan; a sample:
"Reading Jorie Graham’s poems in Never is like watching a slow-motion nature documentary where an anaconda ever so lazily disarticulates its jaw and inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, swallows a goat. Such microscopic infatuation with detail is entrancing, the world slowed to the creeping choreography of muscle; but it can be blindingly tedious....
"Graham’s poems are increasingly like the incessant doodles of a patient in a mad ward, all that energy and meticulous observation grinding toward nothing. Graham’s most devoted critic, Helen Vendler (who has dragged the whole Graham bandwagon at times), believes that poetry is a 'structural and rhythmic enactment,' that mimetic accuracy is 'the virtue, the fundamental ethics, of art.' Graham’s poetry shows how crippling that notion can be—pursued as the highest value, it creates an art that cannot escape its dreary miming gestures. When poetry records only the trivial blizzard of experience, it offers the chaos of act without the order of interpretation....
"Graham’s poems are often a tour de force; but their blowsy logorrhea, their hydraulic overuse of words, explains why a poetry of such grand (and even seductive) ambition can seem so fragile and incoherent. Like a Laocoön coiled not in snakes but in his own intestines, she shows how stultified, how barren, a poet can become when she high-mindedly makes an art with all the false starts and second thoughts (and third thoughts) left in."
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