The Ocean, The Bird, And The Scholar

      Helen Vendler's magnificently poetic 2004 Jefferson Lecture is available online, and despite its length (and its density) it's very much worth the time to read.   It becomes apparent very quickly that Wallace Stevens is lurking perpetually behind Ms. Vendler's thinking here, but there's much to be engaged in her discussion-- much, I'm relatively sure, that will be assailed by contemporary, and younger, critics as being too obscurantist and mythopoeic to be of much practical use.   I'd say, however, that her lecture is more genuinely attuned to the demands of critical process than most today would have it; what should be most immediately apparent to anyone reading her lecture is the prominence she accords imaginative reading. Helen Vendler is one of the better critics still alive, and she alone is worth more than the total contributions of most English departments in any given state or province in North America.