Helen (Hennessy) Vendler - Life and career

Literary critic and educator, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. A professor at Boston University (1966–85) and Harvard (1981– ), she became poetry critic of the New Yorker in 1978. Through her numerous reviews there and in the New York Review of Books she exerted a powerful influence over the reputations and publications of contemporary poets.

1933) is a leading American critic of poetry.

Life and career

Vendler has written books on W. 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) Modern American Poets (1981) Stevens: Poems (1982) The Odes of John Keats (1983) The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985) editor The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986) Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (1986) Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987) Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critic (1988) Poems by W. Yeats (Arion Press, 1990) The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets (1995) alternate subtitle 'Strategies of Poetic Redefinition' John Keats, 1795-1995: With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection (1995) with Leslie A. Bond The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995) The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (1995) Poems - Poets - Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (1996) Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1996) essays The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) Seamus Heaney (1998) Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003) editor 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)