At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Dec. 3, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Helen Vendler was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Helen Vendler, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, was born Helen Hennessy into a devout Boston Irish Catholic family in 1933. She died on April 23, 2024, at 90 years of age and is survived by her beloved son, David; her daughter-in-law, Xianchun; and her grandchildren, Killian and Céline (Harvard Class of 2020). Vendler is interred on “Harvard Hill” in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The New York Times called Vendler a “Colossus of poetry criticism.” That is true, but how she would have smiled at the image of herself bestriding those turbulent seas! A truer image of her is as a formidably learned proponent of the educational importance of poetry — a knight of poetry, as one colleague described her, riding out to do battle for bards. She was also the most gracious and generous of colleagues, delightful in conversation, meticulous and cheerful in curricular deliberations. Her kindnesses to students and visiting scholars are legendary.
Vendler inspired generations of students at Harvard and beyond with her exquisite sense of poetic form and her swift grasp of what a poet is doing as an artist. Of her many famous books, she seemed proudest of her textbook for students, refined over years, “Poems, Poets, Poetry.” She wrote for everybody, showing newcomers to Elizabeth Bishop or John Ashbery how amply these poets reward close attention. To lifelong specialists on earlier poets, whether Shakespeare or Milton, Herbert or Keats, she revealed new and unsuspected strata of meaning. No other critic of our time, or, indeed, of the past century, has written about poetry with such illuminating power.
Proficient from girlhood in Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French, Vendler might have gone to any elite college then open to women but was forbidden by her devout parents to attend a secular institution. She therefore matriculated at Boston’s Emmanuel College, where she graduated summa cum laude in chemistry and mathematics. Proceeding on a Fulbright Fellowship to the Catholic University of Louvain to study mathematics, she soon changed to the arts and, in pursuit of them, traveled widely in Italy and France. To prepare for the Ph.D. program in English at Harvard, Vendler enrolled as a special student at Boston University. There she formed a lifelong friendship with her teacher Morton Berman (1924–2022), with whom she shared a passion for music and with whom she would later renew her travels in Europe.
At Harvard in the 1950s, when open hostility to women was the norm, Vendler still found wonderful teachers, among them the Miltonist Douglas Bush, the literary theorist I.A. Richards, the Renaissance scholar Rosemond Tuve (a visitor), and especially John Kelleher, creator of the field of Irish studies in the United States. Kelleher’s example inspired the future spokesperson for Irish poetry and world authority on William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.
After taking her Ph.D., in 1960 Vendler went to Cornell University with her then husband, the philosopher Zeno Vendler. Later, as a single mother, she taught freshman writing at Cornell before moving on to appointments at Haverford, Swarthmore, Smith, and Boston University. She always wrote at night, after her son David had gone to bed. Her growing reputation as the finest critic of her generation brought her the honor of being the long-serving poetry critic for The New Yorker. In 1980 Vendler was invited to Harvard but, out of loyalty to embattled colleagues at BU, continued there in alternate terms until she joined Harvard in 1985. She was appointed William R. Kenan Professor of English in 1986 and later served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as a Senior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 1990 she became Harvard’s first woman University Professor.
Vendler’s books have all become classics, including the stimulating volumes from her five invited lecture series. In her 2001 Haskins Lecture for the American Council of Learned Societies, she quotes Joseph Conrad on “that mysterious power … of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art.” Not impossible of detection to Vendler, however, who wrote brilliantly on George Herbert, authoritatively on Emily Dickinson, fundamentally on Wallace Stevens, and indispensably on Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Her landmark study of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets reveals time and again what centuries of commentary have missed. For example, our former summa in chemistry says the phrase “Time’s best jewel” in sonnet 65 describes not the beloved’s natural beauty but rather its “carbonized allomorph.”
The most challenging English-language poets of the past century have been Americans, successors of Wallace Stevens (who studied at Harvard from 1897 to 1900), on whose long poems Vendler achieved pioneering feats of exposition, as she did with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, James Wright, Frank Bidart, Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Lucie Brock-Broido, and the Boylston Professor Jorie Graham, whose genius Vendler recognized early.
Vendler’s many honors include the presidency of the Modern Language Association; 28 honorary doctorates; the Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government confers in the humanities; plus election to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, which awarded her its Jefferson Medal, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which, last year, awarded her its Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Belles Lettres and Criticism. In 2023 Magdalene College, Cambridge University, of which she was an Honorary Fellow, commissioned an oil portrait of her in which she wears on a chain her Irish grandfather’s pocket watch. Vendler’s greatest delight — after her family — was the esteem in which she was held by poets whose work she revered, especially Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham, who became close friends. She once quoted Czeslaw Milosz to the effect that every achieved poem is a symbol of freedom. This is rarely true of criticism, but it is always true of hers.
Respectfully submitted,
Homi Bhabha
Stephanie Burt
Stephen Greenblatt
Elaine Scarry
Gordon Teskey, Chair
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