I THINK it was Ezra Pound who once defined a lecturer as a person who is paid to talk for an hour about something that could be said in five minutes. Helen Vendler is a lecturer.

Pound’s point was that the man (or woman) who really knows something can tell you all that needs to be said in a few words. At the heart of the Harvard professor Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet are some interesting perceptions about the nature of individual poetic identity. But the four lectures/essays which comprise the book are strung out to such a degree that these paerceptions are all but lost.

Take the introduction. The first sentence promises us that in each of the pieces Vendler will consider the work a young poet has to do before writing his or her first “perfect” poem — by which she means a poem which succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style. In other words, Vendler will show us how Milton became miltonic in the writing of L’Allegro, how Keats turned keatsian with his sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, and how T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath achieved a comparable self-cloning maturity with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Colossus.

So far, so good, if you like explication. The prospect of perhaps learning how each of the chosen poets found his/ her own voice seems if not mouth-watering at least mildly tasty. Alas, Vendler then takes eight pages to say the same thing over and over again, in different words of course but with the same sort of sentence structure, throwing in references to Wordsworth, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Robert Lowell and God.

Truth to tell, the pieces that follow will interest you mostly if you have no opinions of your own concerning the merits of the works discussed, and if you really prefer prose paraphrases to poems anyway. Otherwise, may I suggest that the reader turn straight to page 155, where in a single prodigious 22-lines-long sentence beginning with the word “if” Vendler gives us the whole contents of her book in digest form. This sentence does demonstrate that she knows what she is talking about. But it also shows again that she is nothing if not a lecturer.

Amidst the sophisticated critical waffle, I noticed some quite startling omissions and mistakes. Vendler ignores the fact that the seventh line of Keats’s sonnet as she analyses it formed no part of the original poem, the bit about “pure serene” having been added to replace the plainer “what men could mean” (and, incidentally plagiarises Coleridge in the process).

Vendler says that Thomas Chatterton was 18 when he committed suicide, but he was only 17 and some have suggested that his death from arsenical poisoning may not have been suicide but the result of attempted self-treatment for venereal disease.

Worst of all, on page 65, the good professor announces that “We recall that the phoenix of Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle is male, and is therefore available to Keats as a self-image”. We recall no such thing, and hope that Keats doesn’t either. The phoenix in Shakespeare’s poem is indubitably female, and the turtle-dove male: Distance, and no space was seen/ Twixt this turtle and his queen.

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