Vendler Tapped for National Lecture

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced yesterday that Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler will deliver the 2004 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the federal government’s highest honor for intellectual achievement in the discipline.

Vendler, who has written widely about poetry and memorized all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, said that she will use the prominent forum in May to argue that the study of humanities should be centered on the arts, instead of the traditional focus on history and philosophy.

“For every person who has read the Platonic dialogues, probably 50 have seen a Greek statue,” Vendler said. “By and large, people tend to think about the past more in terms of art and music, rather than history.”

The Jefferson Lecturer is chosen each year by the 26-person National Council on the Humanities—a group of 26 presidential appointees—and receives $10,000 for the speech. Vendler’s address this year will mark the 33rd time this honor has been given.

Dubois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. gave the Jefferson Lecture in 2002 on “Mr. Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley.”

NEH spokesperson Noel Milan said that Vendler’s dozens of books and numerous articles, primarily on English and American poetry, led to her selection by the Council.

Vendler said that, although she is going to speak about the centrality of the arts within the humanities, her own work is not as central to the humanities as are creative works themselves.

“For me I would put it in the penumbra around the arts—literary history, literary criticism,” she said.

Vendler also said that the study of the arts is a relatively new phenomenon in American academia.

“We have such a short aesthetic history here,” Vendler said. “America has always had a deep suspicion of arts.”

This suspicion, Vendler explained, is responsible for the lack of arts education in U.S. schools even today.

“They have eliminated most of the study of the arts from the schools,” she said. “A person can graduate from high school in America without knowledge that there is such a thing as an American architect or painter or poet or composer.”

Vendler said America’s refusal to teach the arts could undermine attempts to study the humanities fields that surround it.

“If you really want to study the past, what better way than having them look at the study of the arts?” she asked. “Anything done in the 17th century is as relevant as anything done in the 20th century.”

She said that even national patriotism is linked to the arts.

“Other countries consider arts a necessary part of patriotism,” she said. “Once that settles in, it naturally becomes part of the schools.”

Vendler will deliver her government-sponsored lecture on May 6 in Washington, D.C.

—Staff writer Joshua D. Gottlieb can be reached at jdgottl@fas.harvard.edu.