American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Resident (1)
Class
Subdivision
402a (1)
1Name:  Dr. Helen Hennessy Vendler
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  1992
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1933
   
 
Helen Vendler was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities for her paper presented to the Society at its joint meeting with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Entitled "Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia: 'Mycenae Lookout' and the Usefulness of Tradition," it is a masterful analysis, not only of the content of the poem, but of the structure of the poetry and how line and meter reflect the emotion the poet seeks to convey. Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1960 (after doing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College, Boston). Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University. She has been a frequent lecturer at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. She has held many fellowships (Guggenheim, Wilson, APS, NEH, etc.) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Modern Language Association (of which she was president in 1980). She holds twenty four honorary degrees from universities and colleges here and in Norway (University of Oslo), England (Cambridge) and Ireland (National University of Ireland and Trinity College). Dr. Vendler is the author of Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963), On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), The Poetry of George Herbert (1975), The Odes of John Keats (1983), Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1986), The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1988), Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1995), The Given and the Made: Lowell, Berryman, Dove, Graham (1995), The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995), Poems, Poets, Poetry (1996), The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), Seamus Heaney (1998) Coming of Age As a Poet (2003), Poets Thinking (2004), Invisible Listeners (2005), and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007). She also has reviewed contemporary poetry for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other journals, and lectures widely both in the United States and abroad. She delivered the 56th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2007. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1992.
 
Election Year
1992 (1)