Daniel Swift

Reducing poetry to a science

Daniel Swift takes ‘the Queen of Formalism’ to task over her scientific approach to poetry in her spiky new collected essays, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar

issue 25 July 2015

  • The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poetry and Poets

    Helen Vendler

    Harvard, pp. 464

Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there objective, even scientific, standards for evaluating literature? Helen Vendler has no doubts. Her spiky new collection of essays begins with the insistence that it is possible to prove how one poem is ‘superior’ to another, and ‘those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity’.

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