Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter
University Professor of English and American Language and Literature at
Harvard, will give a talk “How Emily Dickinson Shapes Her Plots” using a
selection of several poems on Thursday, April 22, at 3:45 p.m. in the F.W.
Olin Center
Auditorium, Room 115.
The talk, sponsored by the English
Department, is open to the public.
Copies of the poems are available
in the English department and will be distributed at the lecture.
Seamus Heaney has described
Vendler as “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages” (The Observer), while A.O. Scott has
offered this explanation of Vendler's unique power as a “reader”: “Vendler
writes less as a scholar (though her learning is prodigious) than as one
impelled by the special pleasure she finds in poems to trace each instance of
that pleasure to its source” (The Nation).
In addition to an immense number
of published essays on the poetry of scores of poets, Vendler has published 17
books (almost all with the Harvard University Press) on poets writing in
English from the 16th to the 21st century, including
volumes such as Part of Nature, Part of
Us, unanimous choice for the National Book Critics Circle Award in
criticism, and acclaimed book-length studies of Shakespeare, Herbert, Keats,
Stevens, Yeats, and Heaney.