“Chronicles of Love and Loss“ by Helen Vendler

In this episode of Private Life, Langdon Hammer reads Helen Vendler’s essay, “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” from the May 11, 1995, issue of The New York Review of Books. The essay reviews James Merill’s posthumous collection of poetry, A Scattering of Salts (1995), as well as his poem “The House Fly,” published in the May 13, 1982, issue of the Review. 

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art. He has reviewed biography and poetry for the Review and has written about the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  

Helen Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known for her contemporary poetry criticism. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Harvard. Vendler was a contributor to the Review for more than forty years.  

You can read “Chronicles of Love and Loss” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.