February 27, 2012

John Irwin, Hart Crane and the Turnbull Lecture

John T. Irwin, Decker Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins, will deliver the Turnbull Lecture this week on the subject of his new book, Hart Crane’s Poetry (cover detail above), recently published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Now in its 121st year, the Turnbull Lecture series has run almost continually since 1891, with interruptions during the two world wars and a gap from 1984 to 1996. A partial list of the luminaries—T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Jacques Derrida, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost—cannot do justice to the scope of the series, nor to the individual contributions of each invitee.

In recent years, the lectures have been offered under the auspices of the Writing Seminars and have continued to bring to the Homewood campus the distinguished critics and poets of the day, including W.S. Merwin, Helen Vendler and Paul Muldoon. See Lectures.