Invisible Listeners

The renowned literary critic offers an enlightening exploration of three great poets that "goes to the heart of our experience of lyric" (Bonnie Costello, Boston University, author of Shifting Ground).

When a poet addresses a living person, we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler looks at three great poets from different centuries who do just that: George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, and John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino.


Through insightful readings, Vendler demonstrates how these poets each invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one—addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers between erotic and quasi-religious language to find the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, must travel to the remote past. In Parmigianino, he finds both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.


By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange—an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.