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Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard College

The Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises are held each year on Tuesday of Commencement Week. They have been a traditional part of Harvard Commencement since the eighteenth century. The Literary Exercises celebrate the humane learning and passion for intellectual exchange that are the ideal and hallmark of the Chapter. The two foci of the Exercises program are a reading by a Poet and an address by an Orator invited by the Chapter.


This year, at the 218th Literary Exercises, the Orator will be Professor Steven Weinberg, Josey Regental Professor of Science at the University of Texas. His subject will be "Without God". The Poet will be Carl Phillips '81, Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He will read a poem "Night". Music at the Exercises will come from the Harvard Glee Club.

 

The Literary Exercises will take place this year at 11 am on Tuesday 3 June 2008 in Sanders Theatre. They are free and open to the public.

 

Past Orators and Poets

2007 Jeremy Waldron, C.D. Wright
2006 Sean Wilentz, Elizabeth Alexander
2005 John Deutch, poems by Robert Creeley
2004 Niall Ferguson, David P. Smith
2003Ruth Simmons, Mary Oliver
2002Simon Schama, Charles Wright
2001 Garrison Keillor, Lucie Brock-Broido
2000 K. Anthony Appiah, Heather McHugh
1999Martha Minow, Frank Bidart
1998E.O. Wilson, Usef Komunyakaa
1999Anne Fadiman, Paul Muldoon
1996Diana Eck, David Ferry
1995Margaret Geller, John Holland
1994Madeleine Albright, Allen Ginsberg
1993John Wideman, Rita Dove
1992Dudley Herschbach, Jorie Graham
1991Grace Paley, Alan Dugan
1990Arnold S. Relman, Louise Gluck
1989J. Anthony Lewis, W.S. Merwin
1988Nadine Gordimer, Charles Simic
1987Alfred Kazin, Amy Clampitt
1986Freeman Dyson, Michael Harper
1985Cynthia Ozick, Robert Bly
1984Margaret MacVicar, Seamus Heaney
1983Annie Dillard, Galway Kinnell
1982John Kenneth Galbraith, May Swenson
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