Professor
Helen Hennessy Vendler
Harvard University
Language and literary scholar; Educator; Writer (critic)
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
Literature and Language Studies
Elected
1972
Helen Vendler (b. 1933) is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. She has written on lyric poetry since 1960; among her books are ones on Yeats (2), Stevens (2), Herbert, Keats, Shakespeare, and Seamus Heaney; her essays have been issued in three selections (Part of Nature, Part of Us; The Music of What Happens; and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar). She has also been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. She has taught at Cornell, Smith, Boston University, The University of Bordeaux, and Harvard University. She was elected President of the MLA, and has given the Jefferson Lecture for the NEH. Her work aims at creating a better understanding of the work required to create a poem.
Last Updated