ANN ARBOR—Helen Vendler, described recently by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani as “the most astute and eloquent critic of poetry today,” will present a public lecture on “Robert Lowell and Depressive Form” at 5 p.m., Jan. 12, in the University of Michigan’s Rackham Amphitheater.

Vendler has been poetry critic for the New Yorker since 1978, and has published more than 300 essays and reviews in the New York Times, New York’s Review of Books, London’s Review of Books, and many other journals. Her most recent work is “Seamus Heaney.” She is also author and/or editor of many other books, including “The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” an illuminating poem-by-poem analysis of all 154 sonnets, as well as books on Yeats, Wallace Stevens, George Herbert, and Keats.

Vendler, a Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, will be a Visiting Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities, Jan. 10-23. Her talk, the Institute’s Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, is included in the Visiting Writer series sponsored by the Department of English and the Office of the Provost.

The event is free and open to the public.

The lecture will be followed by a reception in 1524 Rackham, the Institute’s Osterman Common Room.

Institute for the Humanities