Helen Vendler – Poems, Poets, Poetry – Fall 2016 – Video Lecture 1: Poetry and History

The late Helen Vendler (1933–2024) taught the final incarnation of “Poems, Poets, Poetry,” her Harvard General Education course on lyric poetry, in the fall of 2016. Midsemester, she was forced to cancel a week of classes due to illness. As make-ups, she recorded two video lectures in her office in the Barker Center. In this lecture, on “Poetry and History,” she discusses Robert Lowell’s “The March 1,” William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” and Jorie Graham’s “What the End Is For.”