From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as America’s leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a “Vendler-Perloff standoff,” Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. “Helen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,” she wrote in 1999.

Now fate has paired them again: Perloff’s death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendler’s at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetry—how to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.

Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is a feat of “close reading,” examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing “Sonnet 23,” for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these “liquid repeated” letters are “signs of passion.”

For Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is “the most intimate of genres,” whose purpose is to let us “into the innermost chamber of another person’s mind.” To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.

Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as “eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.” She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem “A Test of Poetry” begins:

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry

systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
we tossed in tune when we write poems?

For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. “Poetic discourse,” she wrote, “defines itself as that which can violate the system.”

For Vendlerites, Perloff’s approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendler’s taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her “poet friends … really want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!”) Vendler’s scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloff’s focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e. When it came to living poets, Vendler’s favorites tended to win literary prizes—Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloff’s seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.

These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the critics’ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.

Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloff’s understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno—German Jewish émigrés of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because “artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.” Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay “In Defense of Poetry,” where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for “making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice” in studying the humanities.

There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be remembered—together, for all their differences—as examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.

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A new abortion ban in Florida has providers scrambling—and pregnant women reassessing their options. But the law has implications well beyond the Sunshine State. More after these four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s contempt knows no bounds. How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter Those who teach free speech need to practice it, Will Creeley argues. Are white women better now?

Losing an Access Point

After two years of reporting on abortion for The Atlantic, I’ve noticed that providers and clinic administrators are usually pretty eager to talk with me. They’re happy to help demystify their work, or to explain how they’re responding to new developments in the legal system.

Not this week. Over the past two days, when I’ve reached out to providers and clinic staff across Florida, almost none of them had time for an interview. They were far too busy, they told me via email or harried phone call, treating and triaging an overwhelming number of patients trying to obtain an abortion before tomorrow’s new six-week cutoff takes effect.

Florida clinics have plastered warnings about the new ban across their websites for a while now: By May 1, in accordance with state law, abortions after six weeks will be prohibited, with exceptions included for rape and incest (which, in practice, are not often granted). Until now, abortions under 15 weeks have been legal in Florida, and since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the state has served as a kind of haven for women seeking the procedure from nearby states with stricter laws. More than 9,000 people traveled to Florida to obtain an abortion in 2023, and the proportion of Florida abortions provided to out-of-state patients increased from 5 percent in 2020 to 11 percent in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on advancing reproductive rights.

Florida was “the beacon of access for all of the Southeast,” said Daniela Martins, who leads case management for the Women’s Emergency Network, a Florida-based abortion fund, and who called me in between working with two pregnant patients. In recent weeks, Florida providers have been working weekends and late nights to perform as many abortions for as many patients as possible before tonight’s midnight cutoff. “We’ve seen people elsewhere going without essential health care, bleeding in ERs, and we are fully aware that’s going to be Florida soon,” Martins said.

Until now, Martins’s job has involved helping women obtain abortions in Florida; for a typical patient, her organization will cover the cost of an abortion procedure (typically $600–700), as well as an Uber ride to the provider’s office. Now Florida patients seeking abortions will need to travel as far as Virginia; Maryland; Washington, D.C.; or New York for an abortion. North Carolina, although geographically closer to Florida, Martins said, requires a three-day waiting period in between appointments, and she doesn’t recommend that patients go there. On top of paying for an abortion procedure, Florida patients will now have to come up with money for airfare or gas, as well as a hotel; they’ll need to take time off work; and they might have to find someone to watch their kids for a few days. (Although, realistically, many women who might otherwise have obtained an abortion will not be financially or physically able to travel to have the procedure—which is, of course, the purpose of bans like these.) “It’s now going to cost three times more,” Martins said. “For every three people we could help before, now we can only help one.”

The Florida ban won’t just affect Floridians. Pregnant women who are seeking abortions all over the South no longer have Florida as an access point, which means that providers in abortion-friendly states, including Virginia, Illinois, and New York, will face a crush of new patients. Since the fall of Roe, many of these clinics have tried to anticipate this moment by moving to bigger clinics, hiring more staff, and expanding hours.

“We are expecting a huge influx of patients,” Karolina Ogorek, the administrative director of the Bristol Women’s Health clinic in southern Virginia on the border with North Carolina and Tennessee, told me. She’s hired a new nurse practitioner and set up contracts with two more physicians, expanded the clinic’s schedule to include Saturday and sometimes Sunday hours, and created a new landing page on their website to help out-of-state patients find financial support. She’s not anxious about the coming wave of patients because her clinic has faced a similar situation before, when South Carolina passed its own six-week abortion ban last year. “We are outraged,” Ogorek said. “But there is also a sense of calm. We say, ‘Okay, let’s do this again.’”

Florida’s abortion-rights advocates still have hope: A November ballot measure could, if it passes, protect abortion access in the state. And some Democrats, including the president, now view this fairly red state as a potentially winnable one for the first time in years; they’re hopeful that the issue will bring voters to the ballot box. “We’ve got staff on the ground; you’ve seen our investments begin to pop up in the state of Florida,” Joe Biden’s campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, told reporters last week. “It is one of many pathways that we have to 270 electoral votes, and we’re going to take it very, very seriously.”

But my Atlantic colleague Ron Brownstein doesn’t think a Biden victory in Florida seems especially likely, ballot measure or no. “The more likely scenario is that [Democrats] have to worry about Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” he told me, and “that they don’t have money—or, more importantly, time—to really give much attention to Florida.”

Related:

A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere The abortion underground is preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade (From 2022)

Today’s News

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial held the former president in contempt and fined him $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order. The judge also warned Trump that he could face jail time if he continues making attacks on jurors and witnesses. The DEA is planning to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, according to the Associated Press. The proposal would not legalize marijuana on the federal level for recreational use. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to carry on with the planned offensive in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, “with or without” a hostage deal with Hamas.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 30 Years Ago

By Jim VandeHei

In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared …

Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally …

Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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