Randall Jarrell

Reviewing her book The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets for the LRB in 1998, Tom Paulin wrote that it is Wendler's supreme critical virtue that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making.

James Wood, writing in the paper in 1996, called her the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell.

Wendler contributed a dozen pieces to the LRB herself over the years on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Jory Graham, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin.

She died in 2024 at the age of 90, having spent a lifetime, as Colin Burrow observed in the last issue of the LRB, writing about lyric poetry.

But one of the things that really helped was that she has such a great strike rate of good poems to poems.

I mean, Randall Jarrell, who was a friend of hers, said that every single poet has written enough bad poems to put off any casual reader, which I think is true.

You know, if you read the wrong six Browning poems, you're never going to want to read Browning ever again.

Whereas with Bishop, I think you'd have to really be unlucky to fall on like six bad ones.