The Robert B. Silvers Lecture: HELEN VENDLER

Cultural critic and poetry scholar Helen Vendler delivers this year’s Robert B. Silvers lecture, titled "Poets As Editors."

HELEN VENDLER is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American literature, after completing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Modern Language Association. She has written books on Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, Keats, Shakespeare, Heaney, and Dickinson. Of her three volumes of selected essays and reviews, the most recent is The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar (2015). Other volumes began as lecture series: The Given and the Made (The Eliot Lectures); Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (The Clarendon Lectures); Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (The Mellon Lectures); and Invisible Listeners: Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (the Furman Lectures). She holds 28 honorary doctorate degrees and is a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry in such journals as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The New Republic. 

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