The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry’s testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

Helen Gardner, a vigorous and eloquent champion of traditional literary values, feels that these values have been subverted by some of the ablest of modern academics and by prevalent tendencies in criticism and teaching today. Here she counters those trends and affirms the values she has found in a life devoted to the study of literature.

Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot invites us to “start with the supposition that we do not know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is; and try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry to criticism, what the use of both of them is.”

Here is a rare opportunity to view painting through the discerning eyes of one of the world’s foremost abstract painters. Stella uses the crisis of representational art in sixteenth-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in our time.

There have never been lectures like these: delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, they were more like performances, as the audience heard them. John Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

In this exhilarating book, we accompany Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in with a novelist’s techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction’s most basic mechanisms.

What Rosen’s The Classical Style did for music of the Classical period, this highly praised volume does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of musical language, forms, and styles of the period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and so conveys the very sense of Romantic music.

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading “in order to get started” when writing. Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery’s scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream—and whose vision merits Ashbery’s efforts, and our own, to read them well.

This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. It stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.

Leonard Bernstein’s Norton Lectures on the future course of music drew cheers from his Harvard audiences and television viewers. In the re-creation of his talks, the author considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel to Copland, Shoenberg, and Stravinsky.

The author begins his “nonlectures” with the warning “I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.” These talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e. e. cummings. Together, they form a good introduction to his work.

Frye finds in romantic narratives of Western tradition an imaginative universe stretching from an idyllic world to a demonic one, and a pattern of cyclical descent into and ascent out of the demonic realm. Romance thus forms an integrated vision of the world, a “secular scripture” whose hero is man, paralleling sacred scripture whose hero is God.

A classic work, first published in 1941, translated into half a dozen languages, and now in a fifth edition, Space, Time and Architecture is an the unparalleled work on the shaping of our architectural environment. The discussions of leading architects—Wright, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe, Aalto, Utzon, Sert, Tange, and Maki—are accompanied by over 500 illustrations.

Kermode examines enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible—and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure.

American painter Ben Shahn sets down his personal views of the relationship of the artist—painter, writer, composer—to his material, his craft, and his society. He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.

Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.

When we talk about education, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of “mastery,” with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in pedagogy.

Linda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book confronts the issues posed in representations of the body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists.

In Remembering the Future, Luciano Berio shares with us some musical experiences that “invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory.” His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer’s profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art. Berio’s tone is conversational, often playful, punctuated by arresting aphorisms.

Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the “incestuous and tempestuous” relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. He explores the opposite meanings that the word “modern” has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists, and offers a critique of our era’s attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the “twilight of the idea of the future.”

James Cahill explores the radiant painting of that tumultuous era when the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China dramatically changed the lives and thinking of artists and intellectuals. Over 250 illustrations, including 12 color plates, are drawn from collections in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China.

Art, William Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of academic disciplines. The studio is where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity.

One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution.

What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.