Word: vendler
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...core course is called ”Poems, Poets, Poetry.” But it’s not just Harvard students who associate her with these words: for the literary world, A. Kingsley University Professor of English Helen Vendler means poetry. Poets hope she will sit up and take notice of their work; the criticism she has written on both living and dead bards has become a canon...
...Vendler published her PhD thesis on the Irish writer William Butler Yeats in 1960, a work that she would turn into her first book three years later. Even as a budding scholar, however, she had to admit to herself that she wasn’t ready to tackle Yeats’ poetry. “I felt I was too young to write about the poems, which were so great,” Vendler says...
...she’s ready. With four lectures on Yeats at Oxford University this summer and a book on Yeats’ poems in the making, Vendler has decided to return to the subject that launched her career...
...first book on Yeats, Vendler focused on a prose essay entitled “A Vision,” comparing it to some of his later plays. Her second time around, she will concentrate solely on the poems...
When she first began writing on Yeats forty years ago, Vendler was disturbed by a trend in Yeatsian scholarship that continues to this day. “A lot of the work that had been done at the time on Yeats was biographical and historical, and not enough attention had been paid to the poems,” Vendler recalls. Nowhere in many of the most thorough studies of Yeats’ career, Vendler laments, does it mention the poetic structure of his work. “The poets take a lot of pain in not writing prose...