Word: nortone
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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. And the Harvard archives doesn't contain a great deal of material...
...Chair was named after Charles Eliot Norton, Class of 1846, one of the first lecturers on Fine Arts in the University, appointed Professor of the History of Art in 1875. Norton was something of a renaissance man: aside from his scholarship in Fine Arts, he was one of the founders of Atlantic magazine, a translator of Dante (eventually he taught the first course on Dante at Harvard), and a pioneer in classical archaeology...
...Stillman donation finally gave Norton the public commemoration he so richly deserved, and it also furthered the study of his wide interests in the humanities. According to the bequest, the Chair is supposed to alternate each year between "the various literatures" in one group and the Fine Arts and Music in another. Each year an ad hoc committee of five is appointed by Harvard's president to decide on the following year's visiting professor. Four members, three of whom are associated with the group in whose field the lectureship falls that year, and one from the other group...
...from Bristol to Cambridge University) will speak in the Winthrop House JCR the day after school begins, April 8 at 8 p.m. The title of Ricks's lecture--seriously--is "Five Songs by Bob Dylan." Rumor has it Northrop Frye, in response, is considering adding a coda to his Norton Lectures on "The Secular Scripture" to be called "Myths of Ascent and Descent in 'Lay, Lady, Lay'." Such rumors, though, like so many scriptures themselves, may well be apocryphal...
...collection of essays and lectures, Life History and the Historical Moment (Norton; $9.95), Erikson returns to some of these issues...