One of America’s leading literary authorities will speak on three of the greatest poets of the English-speaking world at a public lecture series in Aberdeen this month. Helen Vendler, Harvard Professor of Literature and Poetry Critic of The New Yorker Magazine, will deliver the James Murray Brown Lectures from May 10-16.
Professor Vendler’s lectures, Soulmaking as Stylemaking: The Young Poet’s Path to the First Real Poems, will look at the works of Milton, Keats and T.S. Eliot.
The lecture on May 10th is entitled “Milton Makes a World: “L’Allegro”, the May 11th lecture will be on “Keats finds a Genre: The Petrarchan Sonnets, from Homer to Insects”, and May 16th will see “Eliot Translates the Sordid: Prufrock and His Vigil.”
The lectures will take place in the beautiful King’s College Chapel as part of the anniversary celebrations to mark the laying of the Chapel’s foundation stone 500 years ago.
Professor George Watson, Head of the Department of English, said: “Helen Vendler is an enormously distinguished literary scholar and critic. We are delighted that she has agreed to bring her insight and inspirations to audiences in Aberdeen.”
Professor Vendler has been Poetry Critic of The New Yorker magazine since 1978, a Pulitzer Prize judge, and has taught English literature at Harvard University since 1981 where she is currently A. Kingsley Porter University Professor.
She has authored or edited some twenty books including The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) and Seamus Heaney (1998), and has written for The New York Times and The London Review of Books. Among many awards she holds honorary degrees from sixteen universities including Cambridge, Washington, Toronto, Oslo and Trinity College, Dublin.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Norwegian Society of Arts. She serves on the Educational Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a member of the distinguished Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
James Murray Brown graduated from Edinburgh in 1951 and taught mathematics at Elgin Academy until 1980. His late wife, Elsie Coral Smith, graduated MA in English from Aberdeen 1940, and also taught in Elgin.
The lectures will take place on May 10th ,11th and 16th at 7:00 pm in King’s College Chapel, and will be followed by a wine reception. Admission is free but tickets must be obtained in advance from the Relations Office on 01224 272014 or email pubrel@abdn.ac.uk