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№ 2007.013 — Stanford University — Commencement keynote
Dana Gioia
Poet and chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
Visual speech map
Dana Gioia at Stanford, 2007
A commencement address about art, complex pleasures, complete human beings, memory, and civic imagination.
- 01 Arts matter
- 02 Complex pleasures
- 03 Complete humans
- 04 Art as knowing
- 05 Emotion and intuition
- 06 Memory
- 07 Consolation
- 08 Do not outgrow art
Challenge
Choose complex pleasures
Gioia asks graduates not to settle for easy entertainment when deeper art can enlarge their lives.
Difficult works can produce richer rewards.
Art asks for patience and full presence.
Challenge becomes a form of human development.
Education
Art makes complete people
The speech argues that arts education is not ornamental; it helps form complete human beings.
Art educates more than the analytical mind.
Science and concepts need imagination beside them.
A full education trains perception and feeling.
Knowing
Truth beyond concepts
Stories, songs, images, and performances express truths unavailable to abstraction alone.
Art engages intellect, emotion, intuition, memory, senses, and imagination.
Art says what argument cannot always carry.
Culture stores what communities cannot afford to forget.
Charge
Keep art alive
Gioia closes by asking graduates to keep art inside adult life as delight, instruction, consolation, and civic imagination.
Art gives pleasure without becoming trivial.
Art helps people suffer and remember.
A free society needs imaginative people.
Transcript
The previously catalogued transcript link is no longer live and is queued for re-sourcing. A video of the address is available above.
Provenance
BROKEN transcript link (checked 2026-06-26): gradspeeches.com is a parked/redirecting domain serving no real content. Provenance: Verified from official archive; cross-referenced with NPR commencement archive; cross-referenced with Open Commencement DB
NPR archive last updated in 2015; destination availability has not been exhaustively rechecked | Open Commencement DB transcript; not independently verified against the original recording | Transcript URL dead (gradspeeches.com is a parked/redirecting domain serving no real content); video fallback present