Helen Hennessy Vendler

Helen Vendler was the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. She began writing about lyric poetry in 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 was 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 also taught at Cornell, Smith, Boston University, and the University of Bordeaux. 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.