English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University

Yeats and Lyric Form

How did Yeats choose the specific form in which he would cast different thematic materials? Did form have ideological meaning to Yeats? Why did some forms persist through his lifetime, and others appear only in one phase? Currently working on the history of Yeats’s styles, Helen Vendler will address these and other questions in her lecture.

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she teaches in the Department of English and American Literature and Language. She is the author of many books on poetry, including Seamus Heaney (1998), The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) and Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987). Her influential essays have appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. Vendler has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation as well as seventeen honorary degrees from universities around the world.