A couple of years ago, I tried to assign a profile of the great poetry critic Helen Vendler, who died last week, at 90. The profile didn’t work out, because Vendler wouldn’t agree to more than a ...

For over a decade, in journals as diverse as the New Yorker and the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Helen Vendler`s criticism has been a controversial and persistent reminder ...

In their latest volumes, two of America’s best-known and longest-lived critics look to poems for clarity about the end of life — what Walt Whitman called “the merge.” In “Last Looks, Last Books,” ...

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, venerable critic and longtime Harvard professor Helen Vendler panned a new anthology of 20th-century American poetry edited by former U.S. poet ...

Helen Vendler is one of the most respected commentators on English-language poetry in our time. Readers coming to this book hoping for wise, well-found instruction will not be disappointed; they will ...

In literary conversation, she is sometimes called “Dame Helen” -- a nickname that can be affectionate or sarcastic, occasionally a little of both. No American critic writing about contemporary poetry ...

Anew book by Helen Vendler is always occasion for gratitude, since for more than 50 years she has provided us with the most exacting writing about poetry of any American critic. Even more welcome than ...

The Players: Helen Vendler, author and one of the nation's leading critics of American Poetry; Rita Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate who's in charge of editing the expansive The Penguin Anthology of ...

In the sixties, three scholarly biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful; all were admirable, if ...

Both Seamus and I were frequently at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo (he for a reading, I for lecturing) ever since 1975. It was the custom for the school to invite younger Irish poets ...

Brett Millier’s new biography of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is a substantial one, adding extensively to the biographical material provided by David Kalstone in Becoming a Poet ...