Helen Vendler
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.Life and career
Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; from 1981 to 1984 she taught alternating semesters at Harvard and Boston University. In 1990 she was appointed the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor, the first woman to hold this position. She has also taught at Cornell University, Swarthmore and Smith Colleges, and Boston University. She married the philosopher Zeno Vendler, with whom she had one son. In 1992 Vendler received an honorary Litt. D. from Bates College.
Vendler earned an A.B. in chemistry at Emmanuel College. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for mathematics before earning her Ph.D. in English & American Literature from Harvard. She has also been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award, in poetry.
In 2004, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Vendler 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 in the study of humanities.
She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
