Kind Words for Contemporary Poets : Academic’s views are respected in lyric circles : SOUL SAYS: On Recent Poetry, <i> By Helen Vendler (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: $24.95; 256 pp.)</i>

Helen Vendler’s credentials precede her by a length and a half. She is Porter University professor at Harvard, a former president of the Modern Language Assn., editor of the Harvard Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, consultant to the MacArthur Foundation and a member of the Pulitzer Prize board.

That a non-poet (and an academic to boot) should wield such influence over American poetry is remarkable. Surely Vendler’s ascendancy would have seemed inconceivable to poet-critics of mid-century like Randall Jarrell and Louise Bogan, who jealously guarded the turf bequeathed them by their elders. Yet the inconceivable has happened; as the commercial goes, when Vendler talks, poets listen.

The 21 essays in “Soul Says” originally appeared as reviews in the New Yorker and other periodicals and, in two cases, as introductions or chapters in books. The poets Vendler discusses, with the exception of Robinson Jeffers, are living (or were when the essays appeared), and are, again with a single exception, fairly well known.

Vendler declares in her introduction that she has striven to be evenhanded, a tough enough task in today’s critical climate.

Speaking of the various ways in which the American poetry pie has been sliced in recent years, she says, “At first I found it hard to understand . . . why people felt they could respond only to literature that replicated their own experience or race, class or gender.” She declares that her own experience as a reader is not constricted by such concerns: “The significant poem, for me, can be about anything, or almost anything.”

Vendler sees the lyric as the main tradition of poetry in English, and she calls it “the voice of the soul itself,” an assertion mirrored in the book’s title. Her definition obviously goes against the confessional grain of much contemporary poetry:

“In lyric poetry, voice is made abstract. It may tell you one specific thing about itself--that it is black, or that it is old, or that it is female, or that it is celibate. But it will not usually tell you, if it is black, that it grew up in Atlanta rather than in Boston; or, if it is old, how old it is; or, if it is female, whether it is married; or, if it is celibate, when it took its vows.” Regrettably, a good deal of contemporary poetry seems content to do just that and only that.

Vendler reserves a few harsh words for poets whose social agenda obscures aesthetic perception of their work. For example, she faults Adrienne Rich, albeit mildly, for the “fundamental Manichaean myth” by which Rich chronically divides the world into either-or: evil victimizers or saintly victims. Similarly, she accurately identifies a good part of Gary Snyder’s work as “boilerplate” or “heavy-handed protest poems.”

Because of their social agendas--in Rich’s case, feminist and gay; in Snyder’s, radical and environmental--Vendler manages to cut through the armor of high moral tone that renders them, in the eyes of many critics, beyond reproach.

At times, though, she handles poetic lapses with an excess of diplomacy, and she generally spares poets the blunt needle she reserves for the likes of Bill Moyers, whose “The Language of Life” she recently demolished in the New York Times Book Review. Because, as she explains, she discusses only poets whom she admires, Vendler is so intent on finding positive qualities that her demurrers often verge on equivocation or get stated as tepid paradox; in the case of John Ashbery she says, “Rarely has an exquisite writer deliberately written so badly.” This hardly answers the first question that readers of contemporary poetry are likely to ask and the first that a critic should attempt to answer: “Why is this good?”

Like the New Critics, Vendler displays a talent for close reading and an apparent dismissal of the particular circumstances of a poet’s life. Still, the identification of persona with poet has been so strong a habit in recent times that she cannot avoid falling into a common error. In discussing the opening of one of Dave Smith’s poems, she observes that “Smith drives out of Richmond” but later confuses the poet with his character by describing how the poem “ends in a fatal accident as the half-asleep, half-drunk speaker crashes into a hearse coming from the funeral of a black man.”

She is at her best when discussing individual poems or passages, especially in the cases of a sonnet by Seamus Heaney, when she performs a brilliant analysis of the relationship of rhyme to reason, and in several sections of Ashbery’s “Flow Chart,” when she finds the emotional core of a poem so wearying it may appear devoid of affect.

Her writing is informal, generally clear and only occasionally marred by academic jargon (“one’s selfhood is bounded by the available discourses of conceptualization during one’s existence”) or neologisms like “trappedness.” As her participation in “Voices & Visions” indicates, she believes in a common reader and wants to elucidate the difficulties of contemporary poetry rather than further obscure them.

Vendler’s greatest weakness as a critic stems from a kind of celebrity worship; she sees the vocation of poets as glamorous. One result is her penchant for “fame dropping”--repeating a witty remark overheard at a poet’s birthday party, discussing her own role in a Pulitzer decision, mentioning how her admiration of a young poet’s work led her to push for the poet’s being hired at Harvard.

Like a tabloid reader lured by revelations about people she idolizes, Vendler repeatedly turns to the most sensational aspects of poets’ work: Lucy Brock-Broido’s eccentric monologues as spoken by a fratricidal twin or by Baby Jessica, the infant trapped in a well-shaft; Allen Ginsberg’s gruesome descriptions of his mother’s physical decay in “Kaddish”; Jorie Graham’s lurid account of a student who has attempted to cut his face off.

It may be that these are merely the stock repertoire of fin de si e cle poetry, but they do clash with Vendler’s claim that she has “never been drawn in a positive way to subject matter.”

The last of the essays, on Jorie Graham’s “Region of Unlikeness,” raises more troubling concerns. In waxing ecstatic over Graham, Vendler forges favorable comparisons to 16 canonical poets in half that many pages and heaps praise on a poem that most readers, I suspect, will find unbearably pretentious. This over-the-top response to an over-the-top poet (who, we are informed, also supplied the title to the book) unfortunately calls into serious question the quality of Vendler’s taste.