Books

• The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 
• Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. 3^rd edition. New York: Bedford Books, 2010.
• Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Seamus Heaney. London: HarperCollins (Modern Masters Series), 1998.
• The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995.
• The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
• The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
• Ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Random House, 1988.
• The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 
• Co-Ed. Harper Anthology of American Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
• Ed. Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. 
• The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
• Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
• The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
• Ed. with Reuben Brower, and John Hollander. I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
• Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Recent Reviews

• "Words That Sing, Dance, Kiss." Poetry. 1 May 2017: 177-186. (Review of Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo)
• "The Two Robert Lowells." The New York Review of Books. 20 Apr. 2017: 4-8. (Review of Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison)
• "I Heard Voices in My Head." The New York Review of Books. 23 Feb. 2017: 45-47. (Review of The Prelude: 1805 by William Wordsworth, edited by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond)
• "Wallace Stevens: The Real and the Made-Up." The New York Review of Books. 14 July 2016. (Review of The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani)
•  “Poet of the Violent and the Chaste.” The New York Review of Books. 21 April 2016: 44-46. (Review of The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom edited by Ben Mazer)
• “Berryman: Tragedy & Comedy Together.” The New York Review of Books. 4 June 2015: 40-42. (Review of The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems by John Berryman)
• “A Dazzling Poet.” The New York Review of Books. 5 Feb. 2015: 40-43. (Review of Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido)
• “Why Aren’t They Screaming?” The London Review of Books. 6 Nov. 2014: 18-22. (Review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth)
• “Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic Ford.” The New York Review of Books. 19 June 2014: 47-50. (Review of Selected Poems by Mark Ford)
• “I Have Not Lived up to It.” The London Review of Books. 3 Apr. 2014: 13-18. (Review of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Vols I-II: Correspondence edited by R.K.R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips)
• “Vision and Revision.” The New Republic. 24 Mar. 2014: 46-49. (Review of The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin)
• “Badger, Mole, and Marianne Moore.” The New York Review of Books. 7 Nov. 2013: 46-50. (Review of Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell)
• “Tragedy in the Bedroom.” The New Republic. 29 Apr. 2013: 39-45. (Review of Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads by George Meredith)
• “They Shined Together.” The New York Review of Books. 7 Mar. 2013: 30-32. (Review of Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis)
• “The Road to Paradise.” The New Republic. 25 Oct. 2012: 49-53. (Review of Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova as translated by Andrew Frisardi)
• “An Evangel for Poetry.” The New York Review of Books. 27 Sep. 2012: 84-86. (Review of Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World)
• “Burnt with Frost.” The New York Review of Books. 16 Aug. 2012: 62-64. (Review of Tim Kendall’s The Art of Robert Frost)
• “The Art of the Inexplicit.” The New Republic. 2 Feb. 2012: 26-30. (Review of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Deleted World, versions by Robin Robertson, and The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton)
• “Are These the Poems to Remember?” The New York Review of Books. 24 Nov. 2011: 19-22. (Review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited and introduced by Rita Dove)
• “Beauty, Violence, and the Gods.” The New York Review of Books. 27 Oct. 2011: 82-85. (Review of The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson)
• “The Instructors.” The New Republic. 15 Sep. 2011: 36-40. (Review of W.B. Yeats & George Yeats edited by Ann Saddlemyer and Words Alone: Yeats & His Inheritances by R.F. Foster)
• “The Art of Flamingo Watching.” New York Review of Books. 23 Dec. 2010. (Review of The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan)

• “The Worn-Out Heart.” The New Republic. 2 Dec. 2010: 31-35. (Review of Canti by Giacomo Leopardi)

Recent Articles

• "American Expansion: The Innovations of A. R. Ammons." Harper's Magazine. Aug. 2017: 68-74. (Adapted from the introduction to The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, 2017)
• "Helen Vendler on meeting Seamus Heaney." The Irish Times. 7 Jun. 2017.
• "On Book Reviewing." The Harvard Review Online. 24 May 2016. (Adapted from lecture, 6 Dec. 1990.)
• “The Poet Remakes the Poem.” The New York Review of Books. 10 Mar. 2016: 40-42. (Adapted from the Robert B. Silvers Lecture, “Poets as Editors,” 2015.)
•  “Seamus Justin Heaney: 1939-2013.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159, no. 2 (June 2015): 1-8. 
• “Save the Humanities in Our Schools.” The New Republic. 24 Nov. 2014: 114-117.
• “Wallace Stevens’ Voice Was ‘Life-Saving.’” The New Republic. 18 Nov. 2013.
• “A Soul Ramifying: Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013.” The New Republic. 7 Oct. 2013: 39-41.
• “Vacillation: Between What and What?” The Living Stream: Essays in Memory of A. Norman Jeffares. Yeats Annual. Ed. Warwick Gould. 18 (2013): 151-68.
• “Writers and Artists at Harvard.” Harvard Magazine. November-December 2012.
• “Reading Is Elemental: How to Preserve the Humanities.” Harvard Magazine. Sep./Oct. 2011: 75-76.
• “Pretending to Be a Real Person.” An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. Ed. Cynthia Haven. Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2011. 183-88.
• “Dear Harold.” Harold Bloom: 80. New Haven: Yale University, 2010. 51-52.
• “Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece.” Imagination and Logos: Essays on C.P. Cavafy. Ed. Panagiotis Roilos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 51-70.
• “Valuing the Creative and Reflective.” Interviewer Handbook. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, 2009.
• “Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems.” A New Literary History of America. Eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. 847-851.
• “Living with Artists.” Yaddo: Making American Culture. Ed. Micki McGee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 67-75.
• “The Future of English: The Future of the Lyrical Imagination.” English Now: Selected Papers from the 20^th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007. Ed. Marianne Thormählen. Lund, Sweden: Centre for Languages and Literature, LundUniversity, 2008. 185-98.
• “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Sweeney Redivivus’: Its Plot and its Poems.” That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown. Eds. Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. 169-94.
• “Stevens and the Lyric Speaker.” The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 133-48.
• “The Later Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 77-100.
• “Humanities Education.” Harvard Magazine. Sep.-Oct. 2004: 66-68.
• “Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive.” The Wallace Stevens Journal. Fall 2004: 247-260.
• “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.” The New Republic. 19 Jul. 2004: 27-32.