Charles eliot norton lectures harvard

Probably the first thing anybody should know about the history of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry is that there isn't any history. The official history of Harvard by Samuel Eliot Morison doesn't contain a single word about the lectureship.

That's because it was founded too recently, in 1926, and for Harvard any event in the twentieth century isn't distant enough to be historical. Even E.J. Kahn's popular work, Harvard, Through Change and Through Storm, fails to mention the Norton lectures.

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And the Harvard archives doesn't contain a great deal of material on the subject either. It was as collection of the manuscripts and most of the posters announcing the dates and times of the various lectures and an admission ticket from the Bernstein lecture.

But aside from a few newspaper clippings, and about 20 copes of the same program from the first lecture given by Aaron Copland in 1952, there's nothing.

The Harvard alumni magazine had a smatte