Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler (née Hennessy; April 30, 1933 – April 23, 2024) was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities.

Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".

Vendler reviewed poetry regularly for periodicals including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She was also a regular judge for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and so was influential in determining writers' reputation and success.

Life and career Helen Hennessy was born on April 30, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Hennessy and Helen Hennessy. She was the second of three children. Her parents encouraged her to read poems as a child. Vendler's father taught Spanish, French, and Italian at a high school, while her mother had taught in a primary school before marriage. Vendler attended Emmanuel College over the Boston Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College because her parents would not let her enroll in "secular education". while Perry Miller refused to admit her to a seminar he led on Herman Melville despite viewing her as his "finest student". Other Harvard professors offered her more support, notably I. A. Richards. Vendler was offered a job teaching in Harvard's English department in 1959, making her the first woman the department offered a job as an instructor. She declined.

Vendler graduated with a Ph.D. in English and American literature the next year. She began teaching English at Cornell University in 1960, after her husband at the time, Zeno Vendler, moved to teach there. She left Cornell in 1963 and spent several years at various other institutions, including a year (1963–64) teaching at Haverford College and Swarthmore College, two years (1964–66) as an assistant professor at Boston University, and another two (1966–68) as full professor. Vendler spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Bordeaux. After that, she was Boston University's director of graduate studies in the English department from 1970 to 1975 and again from 1978 to 1979.

Vendler was a professor of English at Harvard University from 1984 until her death; from 1981 to 1984 she taught alternating semesters at Harvard and Boston University. She has said that she retained her affiliation with BU for several years to ensure that she wasn't "some little token person" at Harvard. In 1992, Vendler received an honorary Litt. D. from Bates College. She was a Charles Stewart Parnell fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1995, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene in 1997.

Vendler delivered the 2000 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Her lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar", used poems by Wallace Stevens to argue for the role of the arts (as opposed to history and philosophy) in the study of humanities. In 2006, The New York Times called Vendler "the leading poetry critic in America" and credited her work with helping "establish or secure the reputations" of poets including Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove. She was also a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1974, 1976, 1978, 1986) and the National Book Award for Poetry (1972).

Vendler received a 2025 Reginald Martin Award for Excellence in Criticism from PEN Oakland.

Personal life and death Helen Vendler was married to Zeno Vendler from 1960 to 1963; the couple had one child.

Publications

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) "What We have Loved, Others Will Love" (1980) Modern American Poets (1981) The Odes of John Keats, (1983) The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), editor Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire, (1986) The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1987) The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, (1988) Poems by W. B. Yeats (1990) Stevens: Poems (1993) The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, (1995) Herman Melville: Selected Poems (1995), editor 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) Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, (1996) essays The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, (1997) Seamus Heaney, (1998) Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (2002) 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)