Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler was born in 1933 in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the foremost American literary critics, Her critical writing maintains a close relationship with the primary material, and her original readings of canonical poetry are firmly grounded in textual evidence. Vendler has devoted much of her career to projects focusing on W. B. Yeats, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens, among others. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980) and was named a finalist for the same award for The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997). Her recent work includes The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays of Poets and Poetry (2015), Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2012), and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007). In addition, Vendler has published reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. She is currently the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard.

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