24 Facts About Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic.

Helen Vendler was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities.

Helen Vendler's academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney.

Helen Vendler's technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".

Helen Vendler was a regular judge for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and so was influential in determining writers' reputation and success.

Helen Vendler Hennessy was born on April 30,1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Hennessy and Helen Vendler Hennessy.

Helen Vendler's parents encouraged her to read poems as a child.

Helen Vendler's father taught Spanish, French, and Italian at a high school, while her mother had taught in a primary school before marriage.

Helen Vendler attended Emmanuel College over the Boston Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College because her parents would not let her enroll in "secular education".

In 1954, Helen Vendler was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for mathematics at the Universite catholique de Louvain but, while traveling to the university, she decided that she would rather study English than math, and the Fulbright commission allowed her to switch her focus to literature.

Helen Vendler recalled that the department's chair told her within a week of entry that "we don't want any women here", while Perry Miller refused to admit her to a seminar he led on Herman Melville despite viewing her as his "finest student".

Helen Vendler was offered a job teaching in Harvard's English department in 1959, making her the first woman the department offered a job as an instructor.

Helen Vendler began teaching English at Cornell University in 1960, after her husband at the time, Zeno Vendler, moved to teach there.

Helen Vendler left Cornell in 1963 and spent several years at various other institutions, including a year teaching at Haverford College and Swarthmore College, two years as an assistant professor at Boston University, and another two as full professor.

Helen Vendler spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Bordeaux.

Helen Vendler was a professor of English at Harvard University from 1984 until her death; from 1981 to 1984 she taught alternating semesters at Harvard and Boston University.

Helen Vendler has said that she retained her affiliation with BU for several years to ensure that she wasn't "some little token person" at Harvard.

In 1985, Vendler was named the William R Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language.

Helen Vendler was a Charles Stewart Parnell fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1995, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene in 1997.

In 2006, The New York Times called Helen Vendler "the leading poetry critic in America" and credited her work with helping "establish or secure the reputations" of poets including Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove.

Helen Vendler was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Helen Vendler was a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for Poetry.

Helen Vendler was married to Zeno Vendler from 1960 to 1963; the couple had one child.

Helen Vendler died at her home in Laguna Niguel, California, on April 23,2024, at the age of 90.