Word: vendler
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Helen Vendler, Porter University professor and world-renowned scholar and critic of poetry, agrees there is undoubtedly a strong poetic tradition at Harvard, but she argues that it would be parochial to think Harvard had a determining role in American poetry...
...support of her argument, she quotes Marianne Moore’s “England” in saying that excellence “has never been confined to a single locality.” Vendler says that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman became two of the greatest American poets of the 19th century despite not having college degrees...
...There is no particular reason that any university should be the nurse of poets right now,” she said. “Anywhere there is a library there will be poets.” Vendler notes that even William Butler Yeats never went to university but rather educated himself at the British Library...
...Vendler agrees that there are aspects unique to Harvard which encourage richness in poetry and literary culture. Harvard still teaches the full range of English literature, which has been scaled down at other Universities in favor of American or World literature. And Harvard has a very strong tradition in classics which underpins even more recent genres...
...plans to be a writer in some capacity after graduating from Oxford, and she attributes much of her success to “the opportunity to work with very talented writers and critics of literature, in particular professors Jamaica Kincaid, Elaine Scarry, and Helen Vendler...