Dame Helen L. Gardner, Norton Professor of Poetry and a visiting professor from Oxford University, said yesterday she will criticize the emphasis on personal experience in current literature when she delivers next month the first of her three Norton Lectures.

"There is too much attention self-revelation, cleverness, and form in many of the works being written today and not enough interest in the people of other times, in the variety of human experience," Gardner, who will present the first lecture November 19, said yesterday.

"I miss the richness in old literature, where one could get a picture of whole society, of different kinds of people interacting," she added.

Gardner has taught English literature at Oxford since 1965. She has written several books, including "The Art of T.S. Eliot," "The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne," and most recently, "The Composition of Four Quarters."

Buckley said yesterday the Norton Lecturer may teach classes at Harvard if she chooses. Gardner currently teaches English 165, "Eliot, Pound, and Joyce," with Ronald Bush, associate professor of English literature.

Deja Vu

Norton Lecturers from previous years include Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Northrop Frye and T.S. Eliot, Jerome H. Buckley, chairman of the English Department, said yesterday.