1975 Metcalf Cup & Prize

Helen H. Vendler, CLA

Professor Vendler joined the faculty in 1955. She is a University Professor and holds joint appointments in the College of Liberal Arts as a professor of English and director of graduate studies in the English Department.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Executive Council of Modern Languages Association, Dr. Vendler served on juries for the National Book Award in Poetry in 1972 and for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974. She has written chiefly on contemporary poetry, both British and American.

She inspires her students to dedicate themselves to rigorous and humane standards of scholarship. Her teaching conforms to the highest standards in her discipline because it is her teaching that sets those standards. She makes the reading and understanding of poetry a valued and permanent part of her students’ lives. As a teacher, she is the kind of critic that every perceptive reader of poetry would wish to become; nothing contributes more to that possibility for her own students than does her teaching.