Ever since Nicholas Boylston endowed a chair in rhetoric and oratory at Harvard with £.1,500 in 1771, its ten distinguished holders, starting with John Quincy Adams, have been charged to pursue excellence "in the theory and practice of writing and speaking well, that is, with method, elegance, harmony, dignity and energy." Last week Harvard assigned the chair to methodical, elegant, harmonious, dignified, energetic Robert Stuart Fitzgerald, 54, poet, journalist, anthologist and translator of the classics.
The Boylston chair has now gone to four poets in succession: Fitzgerald's predecessors were Robert Hillyer, who retired in 1944 and died in 1961, Theodore...
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