Word: norton
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...Igor Stravinsky in music. But the committee has also been turned down. It tried to get W.H. Auden one year but he couldn't come. It seems that Auden wanted to come, but he was headed in the opposite direction, toward England. Edmund Wilson also turned down the Norton Chair, apparently because he didn't like lecturing to big crowds. Others have been asked to become Norton professors and turned it down, but they're still living and ostensibly still up for consideration...
Once a visiting professor for the Norton Chair of Poetry has been chosen, his appointment lasts one year and he must give six lectures "not previously printed or delivered in public." The lecturer must turn over his manuscript to Harvard for publication, usually by Harvard University Press. But in the past, not all the lecturers have handed in their manuscripts. Robert Frost's manuscript for his 1936 Norton lectures. "The Renewal of Words," can't be found in the Harvard archives, and apparently he never turned one in, probably because most of his lectures were extemporaneous in his second lecture...
...Talent," continually applauded and sometimes used as propaganda by conservative English departments trying to dictate classical educations, he says it was "perhaps the most juvenile." Harry Levi '33, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, saw Eliot speak when Levin was an undergraduate, and he's seen many of the Norton lectures since then. When asked which lecture meant the most to him, he said that Edwin Panovsky's presentation. "Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character," given in 1947-48, was "most stimulating, a brilliant exposition of art history using the history of art to illustrate the history of ideas...
Levin said the Norton lectures are valuable because they get practitioners in the arts to set out their theories. Igor Stravinsky's lectures in 1939-40 on "The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons" are strong examples; they're the only lectures to be given in a foreign language, French, Aaron Copland was the Norton lecturer in 1951-52 with "Music and Imagination." And in 1956-57 the painter Ben Shahn not only gave "exceptional lectures" on "The Shapes of Content" but he set up a studio in the basement of the Fogg museum, where he allowed...
Since the inception of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry in 1925, there have been 35 lecturers; there were 13 years when no lectures were given. During and after World War II, the lectures were cancelled for six years; other cancellations were necessary because there weren't enough funds. Even though there was $562,000 in the endowment as of last June (more than twice the amount of the original gift), the interest of roughly $25,000 per year doesn't provide for the maximum salary of a full professor of the Faculty and for other costs incurred...