James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association (MLA), 1969 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1970 Metcalf Cup & Prize, Boston University, 1975 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, 1980 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, 1996 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, American Council of Learned Societies, 2001 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004 Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013 Helen Vendler (née Hennessy; April 30, 1933 – April 23, 2024) was an American academic, writer and literary critic.

She was also a regular judge for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and so was influential in determining writers' reputation and success.

She recalled that the department's chair told her within a week of entry that "we don't want any women here",[6] while Perry Miller refused to admit her to a seminar he led on Herman Melville despite viewing her as his "finest student".

[7] She has said that she retained her affiliation with BU for several years to ensure that she wasn't "some little token person" at Harvard.

[4] In 1985, Vendler was named the William R. Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language.

[12][13] Her lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar",[14] used poems by Wallace Stevens[15] to argue for the role of the arts (as opposed to history and philosophy) in the study of humanities.

[16] In 2006, The New York Times called Vendler "the leading poetry critic in America" and credited her work with helping "establish or secure the reputations" of poets including Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove.

[4] Vendler wrote books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney.