Helen Vendler was the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. Her many books of poetry criticism include The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010), and The Ocean, The Bird and The Scholar (2015). Her book Part of Nature: Modern American Poets (1980) won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism. In 2023, she was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Vendler died of cancer at age 90, on the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, April 23, 2024.