The eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler stood in a soft glow of light, her face radiant.
Vendler's Boston-flavored voice enraptured her audience gathered at Emory University, where she delivered the annual Richard Ellmann Lectures, named for the former Emory professor and acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde.
Looking back at her 1994 lectures, titled "The Breaking of Style," I remember the warmth of her personality, how she made her listeners feel part of a larger community of poetry.
Vendler, professor of Harvard from 1985 through 2018 and the author of 23 books, died Tuesday at age 90 at her home in Laguna Niguel, Calif., after suffering from cancer.
The Ellmann lectures displayed the amazing breadth of Vendler's criticism, comparing the careers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham, three poets of divergent eras and techniques. She found that each of them reached new heights in their work by changing styles in midcareer.
Vendler, the poetry critic at the New Yorker from 1978-1996 and frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the New Republic and the New York Review of Books, championed the careers of contemporary poets like Graham and Rita Dove.
She also re-evaluated the work of 20th century American poet Wallace Stevens and the 17th century British poet George Herbert, concluding that Herbert's achievements excelled that of his contemporary, John Donne.
Vendler's "Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire" promoted his longer poems as major accomplishments, countering the prevailing judgment that they were pretentious and monotonous.
Her book, "The Odes of John Keats," set the standard for modern criticism of the Romantic poet's astounding outpouring of major poetry in the spring and summer of 1819.
Vendler edited "The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry," one of my favorite books. The anthology gives an expansive, canon-defining offering of 20th century American poetry.
In Vendler's eyes, poetry from different eras shared a common seeking for emotional truth through memorable language.
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