#  Helen Vendler: Honored for Lifetime of Achievement in Poetry Criticism 

 





June 26, 2023

 

 

 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”](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674864726) (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](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/). “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](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/06/helen-vendler-honored-for-lifetime-of-achievement/).



 

 

 



 

 

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