November 7, 2005—Helen Vendler, regarded by many as the most influential and probably the most widely read critic of poetry in the United States, will deliver the newly endowed Oberlin Lectures in English and American Literature November 14 through November 18. Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor of English at Harvard University. The lectures are free and open to the public.

"Through her many wonderful books, lectures, and reviews, Helen Vendler leads us first to understand and then to love the great poems and poets of the English language," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, when she delivered the 2004 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intel-lectual achievement in the humanities. "Her vast learning, beautiful prose, and analytical powers bring the power and magic of the written word to life and into our lives."

Titled "Yeats and Lyric Form," the Oberlin lectures include:

• "The Yeatsian Sequence: 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'," Monday, November 14, 7:30 p.m.;
• "Yeats at Sonnets," Tuesday, November 15, 7:30 p.m.;
• "Yeat's Nationalist Measure: 'Easter 1916' and other poems," Thursday, November 17, 7:30 p.m.; "Yeats and Primitivism: 'Supernatural Songs'," Friday, November 18, 4:30 p.m.

The lecture series will be held in Craig Lecture Hall on the second floor of the Oberlin College Science Center, located on the corner of Lorain and Woodland Streets. The series was endowed by the late Professor Andrew Bongiorno '23, who served on the faculty of the English department from 1925 until his retirement in 1967.

Vendler's reviews of contemporary poetry and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. Her most recent books include Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats; Coming of Age As a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath; and Seamus Heaney. Her Harvard book Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poetry won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Vendler received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1985, she taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University. She has held many fellowships and is a member of several academic organizations, including the Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980. She holds 23 honorary degrees from universities and colleges in the United States, England, Ireland, and Norway.