“The Human Repertoire”: An Interview with Helen Vendler on Stevens

I think there will never be a broadening of Stevens’ appeal until some more time has passed. If we believed in teaching our literature in secondary schools in a progressive curriculum, Stevens would seem a logical unfolder of possibilities in Whitman and Dickinson (as well as in Wordsworth and Keats). It saddens me that we have a set of successive rational steps in rigorous textbooks of chemistry or mathematics, compiled with the advice of university specialists in the field, and that nothing at all comparable exists for literature. Northrop Frye once did a series of K-12 literature readers, progressing from myths to stories and poems, and reflecting world literature. Nobody adopted them. In our schools, we don’t even have units on a single poet; there is no way for a student to understand a poet if only a single poem is assigned by that poet. Other countries—as I’ve said before—regard their national literature as a precious element of national identity. We don’t. I don’t know when, or how, that will change. But, as Stevens consolingly said, in an aphorism applicable to many cultural choices as well as to the neglect of literature, “It is a sound like any other. It will end.”