Helen Vendler: Honored for Lifetime of Achievement in Poetry Criticism

Helen Hennessy Vendler remembers the first time she received a copy of her own book in the mail.

“It was a hard-covered object that could be handled and transferred from one person to another out there in the big world,” Vendler said, recalling the awe she felt at unwrapping “Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays” (1963).

Corresponding with the publisher had seemed like a fantasy, but Vendler’s debut felt real as soon as the package arrived from Harvard University Press. “It was as though somebody had taken a piece of your soul, created it into an object, and said, ‘Here’s a piece of you back.’ It seemed to me a form of magic, that the inside could become the outside.”

Read more from the Harvard Gazette here.