Critic Bios

Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) was born in Kentucky. While a student at Vanderbilt, Brooks began his life-long friendship with poet/critic/novelist Robert Penn Warren; the two would later collaborate on what is now considered the quintessential textbook of New Criticism (Understanding Poetry, first edition 1938). Brooks visited England on a Rhodes scholarship, and returned in 1932 to teach English literature at Louisiana State University. The Well Wrought Urn appeared in 1947 and secured his reputation as one of the chief architects of the New Criticism. Brooks taught at Yale beginning in 1947 and became professor of rhetoric thirteen years later. His other books include an important critical study of William Faulkner.

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter Professor of English at Harvard, where she has taught since 1980. Vendler received her undergraduate degree in chemistry; it was only later that she decided to pursue a PhD in English and devote her career to the study of literature. Her first book, Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963), was derived from her dissertation at Radcliffe. On Extended Wings, a study of Wallace Stevens's longer poems, appeared in 1969 to great acclaim. Vendler is widely regarded as the most important living proponent of formalist criticism; in TheArt of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), a rigorously close reading of each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler states that "a poem is not an essay…I do not regard as literary criticism any set of remarks about a poem which would not be equally true of its paraphrasable propositional content." Vendler's other books include The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995), and a full-length study of poet Seamus Heaney (1998).