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I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

Helen Vendler

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Helen Vendler
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: April 30
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Helen Hennessy Vendler
Emily
Poems
Twenties
Written
Learn
Girl
Unnerved
Dickinson
Memorized

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One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
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If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.
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When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.
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Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.
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Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
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All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
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A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.
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The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.
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I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.
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I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.
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Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.
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