ANN ARBOR— Helen Vendler, the Arthur Kingsley Porter
University Professor at Harvard University, will deliver
the University of Michigan’s Tanner Lecture on Human
Values, titled “Whitman on Lincoln: Aspects of Value,” at 4
p.m. Oct. 29 in Rackham Auditorium.

A panel of three visiting scholars will respond to
Vendler’s lecture in a symposium at 9:15 a.m. Oct. 30 in
the Vandenberg Room of the Michigan League. Both the
Tanner Lecture and the symposium are free and open to the
public.

A member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, Vendler
is the poetry critic of the New Yorker, and a regular
essayist and reviewer for the New York Times Book Review
and the New York Review of Books. She received her Ph.D.
in English and American literature from Harvard University
in 1960 and taught at Cornell University, Swarthmore

College, Smith College, and Boston University before
joining Harvard in 1981 as a visiting professor. Vendler
is the author or editor of numerous books, including the
“Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry” and “The Art
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

Participants in the Oct. 29 symposium include Kenneth
Fuchs, director and professor of music at the University of
Oklahoma; Mark E. Neely Jr., the McCabe-Greer Professor in
the Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University; and
Vivian Pollak, professor of English at Washington
University.

The Tanner Lecture on Human Values is funded by a
grant from Obert C. Tanner and is established at six
universities in the United States and in England: the U-M,
Utah, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge.

Previous U-M Tanner lecturers have included sociologist William Julius Wilson, novelists Amos Oz and Toni Morrison, and political economist and historian Albert O. Hirschman.