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following table lists all the published lecture series, with academic year given and year of publication, together with unpublished lectures as are known.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.
| 1926–1927 | The Classical Tradition in Poetry | 1927 | ||
| 1927–1928 | Italian Sculpture of the Renaissance | 1935 | ||
| 1929–1930 | Poetry and the Criticism of Life | 1931 | ||
| 1930–1931 | Rembrandt | 1932 | ||
| 1931–1932 | The Spirit of Icelandic Literature (8 lectures: ???—The Old Poetry—The Sagas of Iceland—...—The World of Reality—The World of Dreams...)[1] [2] [3] [4] | |||
| 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)[5] | 1933 | |
| 1933–1934 | The Spirit of Man in Asian Art | 1935 | ||
| 1935–1936 | 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)[6] | |||
| 1936–1937 | The Poetry of Chiaroscuro | |||
| 1937–1938 | Painter and Poet: Studies in the Literary Relations of English Painting | 1938 | ||
| 1938–1939 | Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition | 1941 | ||
| 1939–1940 | Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons | 1942 | ||
| 1940–1941 | Literary Currents in Hispanic America | 1945 | ||
| 1947–1948 | Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character | 1953 | ||
| 1948–1949 | The Romantic Imagination | 1949 | ||
| 1949–1950 | A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations | 1952 | ||
| 1950–1951 | 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)[7] [8] [9] | |||
| 1951–1952 | Music and Imagination | 1952 | ||
| 1952–1953 | i: six nonlectures | 1953 | ||
| 1953–1954 | Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness | 1955 | ||
| 1955–1956 | The Estate of Poetry | 1962 | ||
| 1956–1957 | The Shape of Content | 1957 | ||
| 1957–1958 | Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain | 1961 | ||
| 1958–1959 | Musical Thought | 1961 | ||
| 1960–1961 | The Springs of Pathos[10] | |||
| 1961–1962 | Félix Candela | The Paradox of Structuralism, Comments on the Collaboration Between Architects and Engineers, The Creative Process and the Expressiveness of Inner Space[11] | ||
| Buckminster Fuller | ||||
| Aesthetics and Technology in Building[12] | 1965 | |||
| 1962–1963 | Tragedy in the Art of Music | 1964 | ||
| 1964–1965 | The Lyric Impulse | 1965 | ||
| 1966–1967 | Romanesque Architectural Sculpture | 2006 | ||
| 1967–1968 | This Craft of Verse | 2000 | ||
| 1968–1969 | Questions about Music | 1970 | ||
| 1969–1970 | Sincerity and Authenticity | 1972 | ||
| 1970–1971 | Problems Relating to Visual Communication and the Visual Environment | |||
| 1971–1972 | Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde | 1974 | ||
| 1973–1974 | The Unanswered Question | 1976 | ||
| 1974–1975 | The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance | 1976 | ||
| 1977–1978 | The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative | 1979 | ||
| 1978–1979 | The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting | 1982 | ||
| 1979–1980 | In Defence of the Imagination | 1982 | ||
| 1980–1981 | The Romantic Generation | 1995 | ||
| 1981–1982 | The Witness of Poetry | 1983 | ||
| 1983–1984 | Working Space | 1986 | ||
| 1985–1986 | Six Memos for the Next Millennium | 1988 | ||
| 1987–1988 | Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present | 1989 | ||
| 1988–1989 | I-VI | 1990 | ||
| 1989–1990 | Other Traditions | 2000 | ||
| 1992–1993 | Six Walks in the Fictional Woods | 1994 | ||
| 1993–1994 | Remembering the Future | 2006 | ||
| 1994–1995 | Writing and Being | 1995 | ||
| 1995–1996 | "The Mute Image and the Meddling Text" | |||
| 1997–1998 | Concerto Conversations | 1999 | ||
| 2001–2002 | Lessons of the Masters (published as:Lasting Origins—Rain of Fire—Magnificus—Maîtres à Penser—On Native Ground—Unaging Intellect)[13] | 2003 | ||
| 2003–2004 | 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)[14] | 2006 | ||
| 2006–2007 | 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)[15] [16] | 2008 | ||
| 2009–2010 | 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)[17] | 2010 | ||
| 2011–2012 | 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)[18] | 2012 | ||
| 2013–2014 | 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...)[19] | |||
| 2015–2016 | 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)[20] | 2017 | ||
| 2017-2018 | 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)[21] [22] | |||
| (The 7th Art and Me—Crossing the Borders)[23] [24] | ||||
| (Poetry in Motion—The Visible and the Invisible)[25] [26] | ||||
| 2021-2022 | Laurie Anderson | Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds[27] | ||
| 2023-2024 | Viet Thanh Nguyen | To Save and To Destroy: On Writing as an Other[28] |