Helen Gardner

Dame Helen Louise Gardner, DBE, FBA (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot.

Her teaching career began at the University of Birmingham, where she held a temporary post. After three years as an assistant lecturer at Royal Holloway College in London, she returned to Birmingham, as a member of the English department (1934–41). She became a tutor at Oxford in 1941 and was a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford from 1942. The University of Cambridge offered Gardner the new chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, but she declined, in part because she had heard that the university's first choice, C.S. Lewis, had changed his mind about refusing the position.

It is better, in reading poetry of this kind, to trouble too little about the 'meaning' than to trouble too much. If there are passages whose meaning seems elusive, where we feel we are 'missing the point,' we should read on, preferably aloud ... We must find the meaning in the reading . ...

Her work met with great acclaim, and she was appointed a CBE in 1962 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1967. In 1971, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received honorary degrees from Cambridge, London, Harvard, and Yale universities. She died in Bicester in 1986.

Gardner's will bequeathed the royalties from the New Oxford Book of English Verse to the National Portrait Gallery, for the purchase of portraits relating to English literature and portraits from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

• The Divine Poems of John Donne, edited with Introduction and Commentary, Oxford at the Clarendon Press (1952 et seq)
• The Metaphysical Poets, Introduced and Edited by Helen Gardner, revised edition, Penguin Books (1957, 1966)
• The Business of Criticism, Oxford University Press (1959, and reprints)
• Edwin Muir: the W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture, University of Wales Press (1961)
• The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, edited with Introduction and Commentary, Oxford at the Clarendon Press (1965)
• A Reading of Paradise Lost: the Alexander Lectures in the University of Toronto 1962, Oxford at the Clarendon Press (1965)
• King Lear: The John Coffin Memorial Lecture (1966), Athlone Press, University of London (1967)
• Literary Studies: An Inaugural Lecture - delivered before the University of Oxford on 1 June 1967 by Gardner, Oxford, Clarendon Press (1967)
• Religion and Literature, Faber and Faber, 1971; ISBN 0-571-09557-7
• John Donne's holograph of 'A Letter to the Lady Carey and Mrs Essex Riche', Scolar Mansell in conjunction with The Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1972; ISBN 0-85417-887-2 (includes a facsimile of the manuscript)
• Poems in the Making: The First Gwilym James Memorial Lecturer, The Camelot Press, for the University of Southampton, 1972 (Standard Book No. 85432-089)
• In Defence of the Imagination: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1979–80, Harvard University Press (1982); ISBN 0-674-44542-2