Due to popular demand we were able to open a select number of seats for this lecture!

Saturday, September 19, 2026
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Downtown Campus Auditorium
27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA 01930
Registration Required

This lecture will be recorded & livestreamed.

CAM Members $5, Non-Members (Adult) $30.
Additional prices available when registering.
Tickets do not include admission to the special exhibition.

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While summering together on Cape Ann in the 1930s, Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko spent their days painting luminous seascapes and evenings reading aloud the poetry of T. S. Eliot. From his early masterpiece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” to Four Quartets, Eliot’s poetry returns time and again to the Gloucester seascapes he encountered near his family’s summer home. Put in conversation, poet and painters reveal Gloucester was more than a shared backdrop—it became a generative landscape where questions of universality, identity, and modernism were forged across mediums.

Dr. John D. Morgenstern (DPhil, Oxford) is a scholar of twentieth-century literature and the arts who has taught in England, Germany, and the United States. He is the coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (2016), coeditor of Modernism in Wonderland: Legacies of Lewis Carroll (2024), and the founding editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. He now serves as an associate librarian at Emory University.

Image Credit: Milton Avery, Gloucester Dawn, c. 1921. Oil on artist board, 20 x 24 in. Francis Lehman Loeb Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Gift of Susan and Steven Hirsch, class of 1971, 2000.37.1. Photograph: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY © 2026 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.