Helen Vendler Quotes

Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

Some readers may be disturbed that I wrote 'The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson' in Emily's own voice. I wasn't trying to steal her thunder or her music. I simply wanted to imagine my way into the head and heart of Emily Dickinson.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.