The underappreciated and often maligned craft of literary criticism has dropped some way from the altitude it enjoyed midway through the past century, but there remain two practitioners who boast a significant public readership today. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom, hailing from the adjacent pedestals of Harvard and Yale, respectively, continue to sell books in generous numbers and maintain a public presence achieved by few others.

Mr. Bloom plies a bizarre, prophetic style of criticism that requires an impossible number of poems to be comprehended simultaneously in a vast nonhistorical constellation – one sometimes visible to Mr. Bloom alone. He inclines toward sweeping assertions and indulges his fascination with the Gnostics and Freud at will. Ms. Vendler, on the other hand, has become known for very close, detailed readings: big ideas in little places. They stand in plain opposition to the grand whims of Mr. Bloom, just as her slim volumes lean lightly against Mr. Bloom’s decidedly fat ones on the bookstore shelf.

Ms. Vendler’s shorter books often follow a distinct format. She draws upon a theme of poets doing something – coming of age, flouting the styles of their age – and then selects appropriate examples. Nearly always these are drawn from universally recognized authors: Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton. Ms. Vendler’s newest book, “Poets Thinking,” based on her 2001 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, is less ambitious than her enormously successful “Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (1997). Rather, it resembles slender books like her “Soul Says” (1995) and “Coming of Age as a Poet” (2003), consisting of four essays with a brief introduction and briefer epilogue tacked on for the sake of cohesion.

Yet Ms. Vendler’s subject is one of considerable interest. It is surprising how little connection is made in the popular mind between thinking and poetic activity. The two are sometimes thought to be downright antipodal. The poet is supposed to be blowsy and impassioned, riding out a high inspired by an almost religious experience. This is a crude remnant from a Romantic age long past, one more apt for rock stars than serious poets. In the past 500 years, poets have spent a great deal of time thinking about poetry and very often displayed that thought in their poetry.

Ms. Vendler chooses four types of poetic thinking and matches them to four suitable exempla. Avoiding poets usually thought of as purposely “philosophical,” such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, she settles on Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and W.B. Yeats. Pope’s “Essay on Man” is retained to discuss techniques of miniaturizing and mocking the prevailing philosophical methods of a given age. Whitman, who has “never been granted much intellectual capacity,” is redeemed through his use of thematic recapitulation in several shorter poems of varying notoriety. Several of Emily Dickinson’s mysterious short lyrics are trotted out for a discussion of rearranged “seriality.” Finally, two well-known late poems by W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” are used to demonstrate the difference between poetic thinking in image and poetic thinking through assertion.

Pope needs some saving, and Ms. Vendler’s efforts should be admired, though one senses a personal grudge behind her labors. She seems to be responding directly to a cross-disciplinary panel that took place at Harvard years ago, in which a group of unliterary experts dismissed Pope as irrelevant to modern readers. Pope is one of the best poets in the language, and it may be true that the governing philosophies of his day (the Great Chain of Being, a stern confidence in fixed social and natural hierarchies) are now considered hopelessly retrograde. But his incredible facility in the satirical vein has yet to be topped. Ms. Vendler could have done more to make this clear – perhaps simply by pointing out the imaginative fineness of Pope’s poetry on a line-by-line basis.

There is more to love in Ms. Vendler’s handling of Whitman, including very useful observations on his tendency to restate an idea by adding a more subtle second description of a particular scene. (This analysis also holds true for the gangly poetry of D.H. Lawrence, who admitted no influence on his poetry beyond that of the Good Gray Poet.) The section on Dickinson is perhaps of the least interest: Ms. Vendler’s highly grammatical approach to “temporality” and sequence in Dickinson’s poetry does little to improve our understanding. But her final section, the most helpful of the four, is energetic and extremely intelligent. Her reading of Yeats’s classic poems cast them in a new light – one of the best results a critic can hope to obtain.

Since Ms. Vendler chose to include the full text of the poems placed under the knife, the reader conveniently needs no outside sources while reading. But in his poem “Tables Turned,” William Wordsworth noted how we “murder to dissect,” and Ms. Vendler, though bearing the best credentials, repeatedly runs the risk of losing her patients on the table. Her prose can catch in the reader’s throat: “If we review the structures of temporality invented over her lifetime by Dickinson to enact her reflections on how human experience can be adequately represented, we see that the poems originally assumed the ‘normal’ presumption that life is essentially a seamless narrative with a beginning, an extended middle, and an end.” Those familiar with Ms. Vendler’s other books will expect little in the way of warmth or humor, but these deficiencies are more than compensated for by the rigor and reliability of her observations. She is functional to a fault, bordering on the observational exactitude of the scientist in her attempt to refocus our attention on these poems.

Compared to Randall Jarrell’s loving treatment of Frost or Whitman in “Poetry and the Age,” which showed genuine joy and even love, Ms. Vendler can seem unforgiving and clinical. There is little evidence that she enjoys the poems on any level. Thanks to her intense investigations, however, it is possible for her readers to return again to Whitman and to Yeats with renewed interest and appreciation. As for her failure to light up the stage with Pope and Dickinson, any critic who can get it right half the time is already beating the odds.

Mr. Hilbert’s poems have appeared in the New Republic, the American Scholar, and the New Formalist.