Helen Vendler
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Helen Hennessy Vendler (born 1933) is a leading American critic of poetry.[1]
Life and career
Vendler has written books on W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats and Seamus Heaney. She is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she has had a position since 1981. She has taught at Smith and Boston University. She married (then later divorced) the philosopher Zeno Vendler with whom she had one son. In 1992 Vendler received a Litt. D. from Bates College.[citation needed]
Vendler did not major in English as an undergraduate. She earned an A.B. in chemistry at Emmanuel College. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for mathematics, before earning her Ph.D. in English & American Literature from Harvard.[citation needed]
In 2004, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Vendler for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.[2][3] Vendler's lecture, entitled "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,"[4] used a number of poems by Wallace Stevens to argue for the role of the arts (as opposed to history and philosophy) in the study of humanities.[5]
Bibliography
- Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963)
- On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, Harvard University Press (1969)
- I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor (1973) editor with Reuben Brower and John Hollander
- The Poetry of George Herbert, Harvard University Press (1975)
- Part of Nature Part of Us: Modern American Poets, Harvard University Press (1980)
- Modern American Poets (1981)
- Stevens: Poems (1982)
- The Odes of John Keats, Harvard University Press (1983)
- The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Harvard University Press (1985) editor
- The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986)
- Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire, Harvard University Press (1986)
- Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987)
- Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Harvard University Press (1988)
- Poems by W. B. Yeats Selected and with an introduction by Helen Vendler, ([1] Arion Press (1990)
- The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Harvard University Press (1995)
- Herman Melville: Selected Poems selected and with an introduction by Helen Vendler, Arion Press (1995)
- John Keats, 1795-1995: With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection, Harvard University Press (1995) with Leslie A. Morris and William H. Bond
- The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Harvard University Press (1995)
- The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (1995)
- Poems - Poets - Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (1996)
- Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, Harvard University Press (1996) essays
- The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Harvard University Press (1997)
- Seamus Heaney, Harvard University Press (1998)
- Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003) editor
- Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath, Harvard University Press(2003)
- Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Harvard University Press (2004)
- Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (2005)
- Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, Harvard University Press (2007)
Notes
- ^ Rachel Donadio, "The Closest Reader," New York Times, December 10, 2006. ("She is also the leading poetry critic in America, the author of major books on Wallace Stevens, Keats and Shakespeare, and for a generation has been a powerful arbiter of the contemporary poetry scene.")
- ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
- ^ Joshua D. Gottlieb, "Vendler Tapped for National Lecture," Harvard Crimson, March 12, 2004.
- ^ Helen Vendler, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar", text of Jefferson Lecture at NEH website.
- ^ Sam Teller, "Vendler Advocates Larger Role for Arts in Academia," Harvard Crimson, March 15, 2005.
External links
- [2] Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National The Book Show, 7 February 2008
- Conversation with Vendler (NEH)
- Invisible Listeners Book (Princeton University Press)
- "The Closest Reader." (New York Times Profile)
- Helen Vendler author page and archive from The New York Review of Books
- Vendler audio interview on the friendship and correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell