Helen Vendler

Helen Hennessy Vendler (b. 1933) is a leading American critic of poetry.

Life and career

Vendler has written books on W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats and Seamus Heaney, amongst other works. She is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she has had a position since 1981. She married the philosopher Zeno Vendler (1921-2004) with whom she had one son. In 1992 Vendler received an Litt.D. from Bates College.

Vendler did not major in English as an undergraduate, but earned her degree in chemistry. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for mathematics, before earning her PhD in English & American Literature from Harvard.

Bibliography

• Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963)
• On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (1969)
• I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor (1973) editor with Reuben Brower and John Hollander
• The Poetry of George Herbert (1975)
• Part of Nature Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980)
• Modern American Poets (1981)
• Stevens: Poems (1982)
• The Odes of John Keats (1983)
• The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985) editor
• The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986)
• Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (1986)
• Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987)
• Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critic (1988)
• Poems by W. B. Yeats (Arion Press, 1990)
• The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets (1995) alternate subtitle 'Strategies of Poetic Redefinition'
• John Keats, 1795-1995: With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection (1995) with Leslie A. Morris and William H. Bond
• The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995)
• The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (1995)
• Poems - Poets - Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (1996)
• Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1996) essays
• The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997)
• Seamus Heaney (1998)
• Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003) editor
• Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (2003)
• Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004)
• Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (2005)
• Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007)

External links

• Conversation with Vendler
• Invisible Listeners Book