Vendler, Helen Hennessy

1933–, American poetry critic, b. Boston; attended Emmanuel College, Harvard Univ. (Ph.D., 1960). One of America's most lucid critics of poetry, uniquely adept at close reading, she is also among the genre's great advocates. Her major works include monographs on W. B. Yeats (1963), George Herbert (1975), Wallace Stevens (1969 and 1984), and Seamus Heaney (1998) as well as studies of Keats's Odes (1983) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) and an analysis of works by Herbert, Walt Whitman, and John Ashbery (2005). Among her books on aspects of contemporary poetry are Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), Soul Says (1995), The Given and the Made (1996), and Coming of Age as a Poet (2003). Vendler has also edited a number of anthologies, notably The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985). She has taught at Harvard since 1985.