The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard University was established in 1925 as an annual lectureship in "poetry in the broadest sense" and named for the university's former professor of fine arts. Distinguished creative figures and scholars in the arts, including painting, architecture, and music deliver customarily six lectures. The lectures are usually dated by the academic year in which they are given, though sometimes by just the calendar year.
Many but not all of the Norton Lectures have subsequently been published by the Harvard University Press. The following table lists all the published lecture series, with academic year given and year of publication, together with unpublished lectures as are known. Titles under which the lectures were published are not necessarily titles under which they were given.
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures + Table of lecturers and lectures held:Years Lecturer Title Published 1926–1927 Gilbert Murray The Classical Tradition in Poetry 1927 1927–1928 Eric Maclagan Italian Sculpture of the Renaissance 1935 1929–1930 H. W. Garrod Poetry and the Criticism of Life 1931 1930–1931 Arthur Mayger Hind Rembrandt 1932 1931–1932 Sigurður Nordal The Spirit of Icelandic Literature (8 lectures: ???—The Old Poetry—The Sagas of Iceland—...—The World of Reality—The World of Dreams...) 1932–1933 T. S. Eliot The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (The Relation of Criticism and Poetry—Poetry and Criticism in the Time of Elizabeth—The Classical Tradition: Dryden and Johnson—The Theories of Coleridge and Wordsworth—The Practice of Shelley and Keats—Arnold and the Academic Mind—The Modern Mind: I—The Modern Mind: II) 1933 1933–1934 Laurence Binyon The Spirit of Man in Asian Art 1935 1935–1936 Robert Frost The Renewal of Words (The Old Way to Be New—Vocal Imagination, the Merger of Form and Content—Does Wisdom Signify—Poetry as Prowess (Feat of Words)—Before the Beginning of a Poem—After the End of a Poem) 1936–1937 Johnny Roosval The Poetry of Chiaroscuro 1937–1938 Chauncey Brewster Tinker Painter and Poet: Studies in the Literary Relations of English Painting 1938 1938–1939 Sigfried Giedion Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition 1941 1939–1940 Igor Stravinsky Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons 1942 1940–1941 Pedro Henríquez Ureña Literary Currents in Hispanic America 1945 1947–1948 Erwin Panofsky Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character 1953 1948–1949 C. M. Bowra The Romantic Imagination 1949 1949–1950 Paul Hindemith A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations 1952 1950–1951 Thornton Wilder The American Characteristics in Classic American Literature (Adapting an Island Language to a Continental Thought—Thoreau, or the Bean-Row in the Wilderness—Emily Dickinson, or the Articulate Inarticulate—Walt Whitman and the American Loneliness) 1951–1952 Aaron Copland Music and Imagination 1952 1952–1953 E. E. Cummings i: six nonlectures 1953 1953–1954 Herbert Read Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness 1955 1955–1956 Edwin Muir The Estate of Poetry 1962 1956–1957 Ben Shahn The Shape of Content 1957 1957–1958 Jorge Guillén Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain 1961 1958–1959 Carlos Chávez Musical Thought 1961 1960–1961 Eric Bentley The Springs of Pathos 1961–1962 Félix Candela The Paradox of Structuralism, Comments on the Collaboration Between Architects and Engineers, The Creative Process and the Expressiveness of Inner SpaceBuckminster FullerPier Luigi Nervi Aesthetics and Technology in Building1965 1962–1963 Leo Schrade Tragedy in the Art of Music 1964 1964–1965 Cecil Day-Lewis The Lyric Impulse 1965 1966–1967 Meyer Schapiro Romanesque Architectural Sculpture 2006 1967–1968 Jorge Luis Borges This Craft of Verse 2026 1968–1969 Roger Sessions Questions about Music 1970 1969–1970 Lionel Trilling Sincerity and Authenticity 1972 1970–1971 Charles Eames Problems Relating to Visual Communication and the Visual Environment 1971–1972 Octavio Paz Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde 1974 1973–1974 Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question 1976 1974–1975 Northrop Frye The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance 1976 1977–1978 Frank Kermode The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative 1979 1978–1979 James Cahill The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting 1982 1979–1980 Helen Gardner In Defence of the Imagination 1982 1980–1981 Charles Rosen The Romantic Generation 1995 1981–1982 Czesław Miłosz The Witness of Poetry 1983 1983–1984 Frank Stella Working Space 1986 1985–1986 Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Next Millennium 1988 1987–1988 Harold Bloom Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present 1989 1988–1989 John Cage I-VI 1990 1989–1990 John Ashbery Other Traditions 2000 1992–1993 Umberto Eco Six Walks in the Fictional Woods 1994 1993–1994 Luciano Berio Remembering the Future 2006 1994–1995 Nadine Gordimer Writing and Being 1995 1995–1996 Leo Steinberg "The Mute Image and the Meddling Text" 1997–1998 Joseph Kerman Concerto Conversations 1999 2001–2002 George Steiner Lessons of the Masters (published as:Lasting Origins—Rain of Fire—Magnificus—Maîtres à Penser—On Native Ground—Unaging Intellect) 2003 2003–2004 Linda Nochlin Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (published as:Renoir's Great Bathers: Bathing as Practice, Bathing as Representation—Manet's Le Bain: The Déjuner and the Death of the Heroic Landscape—The Man in the Bathtub: Picasso's Le Meutre and the Gender of Bathing—Monet's Hôtel des Roches Noires: Anxiety and Perspective at the Seashore—Real Beauty: The Body in Realism—More Beautiful than a Beautiful Thing: The Body, Old Age, Ruin, and Death) 2006 2006–2007 Daniel Barenboim Sound and Thought (published in Music Quickens Time as: Sound and Thought—Listening and Hearing—Freedom of Thought and Interpretation—The Orchestra—A Tale of Two Palestinians—Finale) 2008 2009–2010 Orhan Pamuk The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (What Happens to Us as We Read Novels—Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?—Character, Time, Plot—Pictures and Things—Museums and Novels—The Center) 2010 2011–2012 William Kentridge Six Drawing Lessons (In Praise of Shadows—A Brief History of Colonial Revolts—Vertical Thinking: A Johannesburg Biography—Practical Epistemology: Life in the Studio—In Praise of Mistranslation—Anti-Entropy) 2012 2013–2014 Herbie Hancock The Ethics of Jazz (The Wisdom of Miles Davis—Breaking the Rules—Cultural Diplomacy and the Voice of Freedom—Innovation and New Technologies—Buddhism and Creativity—Once upon a Time...) 2015–2016 Toni Morrison The Origin of Others - The Literature of Belonging (Romancing Slavery—Being and Becoming the Stranger—The Color Fetish—Configurations of Blackness—Narrating the Other—The Foreigner's Home) 2017 2017–2018 Frederick Wiseman Wide Angle: The Norton Lectures on Cinema (The Search for Story, Structure, and Meaning in Documentary Film: Part I—The Search for Story, Structure, and Meaning in Documentary Film: Part II) Agnès Varda (The 7th Art and Me—Crossing the Borders) Wim Wenders (Poetry in Motion—The Visible and the Invisible) 2021–2022Laurie AndersonSpending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds2023–2024Viet Thanh NguyenTo Save and To Destroy: On Writing as an Other For years not listed, there was no incumbent in the post.
External links Article from Harvard Gazette naming 2006 lecturer (date later changed to fall 2006) and giving history of series List of incumbents, 1926–2002, as reported by Harvard University's English Department (Dead link - see copy at the Wayback Machine) Norton Lectures at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University
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