Yeats and Lyric Form

Helen Vendler, an eminent literary critic and scholar, is a leading authority in the field of poetry. As Henri Cole explains, "When I think of Helen Vendler, I think of her listening--listening to a seminar student explicate “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”; listening to Wagner’s opera of immolation and love, The Ring Cycle; listening to new poems by Lucie Brock-Broido or Seamus Heaney at Harvard’s Lamont Library; listening to the somber green water splash in the Giudecca canal; listening to the carnal and bloody acts of Hamlet; and listening to me—on the other end of the telephone line--report the latest treachery of my mother’s body. Helen writes to explain things to herself, she says. And she has been writing books for forty years."

Vendler's books include Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays in 1963, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems in 1969, which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize; The Poetry of George Herbert in 1975, The Odes of John Keats in 1983, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire in 1984, The Given and the Made in 1995, The Breaking of Style in 1995, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1997, Seamus Heaney in 1998, and Coming of Age as a Poet (forthecoming).

Vendler's essays have been collected in three volumes: Part of Nature, Part of Us in 1980, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 1981; The Music of What Happens in 1988, and Soul Says in 1995. She has also written a textbook and anthology, Poems, Poets, Poetry (1995).

From the NEH:

It is Vendler’s skills in unraveling the forms and explaining the heart of a poem that have made her one of the most influential voices in poetry criticism today. “She is like a receiving station picking up on each poem, unscrambling things out of word-waves, making sense of it and making sure of it. She can second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” says poet Seamus Heaney.