Literary critic, Professor Helen Vendler, who is renowned for her work on Irish poetry, will be honoured by Queen’s University today (Friday 10 December).
Professor Vendler, will be awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature for distinction in literature, during Queen’s Winter Graduations. Professor Ed Larrissy, Head of the School of English at Queen’s, will deliver the citation. He said: “Professor Vendler is one of the leading literary critics of our day. Her books on Seamus Heaney, WB Yeats, John Keats and Wallace Stevens are vital reference works for poetry scholars, students and critics around the world.
“Through her groundbreaking work on Heaney and Yeats, she has made a huge contribution to the study of modern Irish poetry. Queen’s has a proud tradition of poetry, and as Seamus Heaney’s alma mater and the home of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, we are delighted to welcome Professor Vendler to the University and to present her with this honorary degree.”
Professor Vendler is an A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she worked alongside Seamus Heaney in the 1980’s. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1997, Seamus Heaney said of Professor Vendler: “She is like a receiving station picking up on each poem, unscrambling things out of word-waves, making sense of it and making sure of it. She can second-guess the sixth sense of the poem.”
In 1980 Professor Vendler became the first female President of the Modern Language Association, and in 2004 she was invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture – the US Government’s highest honour recognition of achievement in the humanities.
Professor Vendler has also been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for poetry. For more information about Queen’s Winter Graduations visit www.qub.ac.uk
