‘Close Reading’ or ‘Practical Criticism’ is around one hundred years old. Its origins as an academic discipline are normally traced back to the founding of the Cambridge Faculty of English in 1926, and in particular to the investigations of the rhetorician and literary critic I A Richards. Richards was keen to find out what happened when bright young undergraduates were asked to write on poems sight unseen, with all authorial and contextual information removed. The results of his fieldwork were published in Practical Criticism of 1929, and suggested that even smart Cambridge students who knew something about literature were hopelessly ill-equipped to interpret and evaluate a poem they’d never seen before when confronted only by the words on the page.

Practical Criticism came into being to remedy this state of affairs, promising to train cadres of aspirant poetry professionals in the science of close reading. Helen Vendler, who died last year at the age of ninety, had the good fortune to be mentored by Richards himself during her graduate studies at Harvard in the late 1950s, and later described him as ‘the most extraordinary teacher of poetry I ever encountered’. From Richards she imbibed a commitment to painstaking analysis of the verbal choices made by poets and the belief that if a critic paid sufficient attention to the minutiae of a sonnet or lyric, then she or he might ‘inhabit’ the poem – hence the title of her final collection of essays on poets from John Donne to Ocean Vuong.

The essays in it were written between 2021 and 2024 for Leon Wieseltier’s magazine Liberties and constitute a fitting capstone to a career-long obsession with poetry that began in Vendler’s mid-teens, when she read and memorised a group of Shakespeare’s sonnets and was overwhelmed by the conviction that ‘a poem