When Poetry Could Define a Life

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.