| 1888 | Sir Leslie Stephen | English Literature |
| 1889 | Sir Edmund Gosse | The poetry of the second quarter of the eighteenth century; Literary criticism of the age of Queen Anne; The development of naturalism in English poetry 1780-1820 |
| 1890 | John Wesley Hales | The Elizabethan period with special reference to Spenser and Shakespeare |
| 1893 | Edward Dowden | Inaugural - The sentimental movement - The Romantic movement - Revivals of the past - Naturalism as opposed to romance - The political movement |
| 1894 | Edward Dowden | The French Revolution and English Literature |
| 1895 | Edward Dowden | Elizabethan literature - Puritanism in English Literature |
| 1897 | Duncan Crookes Tovey | The structure of Shakespeare’s plays in special connexion with their sources |
| 1898 | Duncan Crookes Tovey | Some English historical plays of Shakespeare |
| 1898 | Walter Raleigh | Letter writers - Milton and his age - Courtesy literature |
| 1900 | Henry Charles Beeching | The history of lyrical poetry in England |
| 1900 | Alfred Ainger | Chaucer |
| 1901 | Alfred Ainger | Shakespeare as a humorist |
| 1902 | Sir Sidney Lee | Foreign influences on Elizabethan Literature |
| 1902 | Barrett Wendell | The literary history of England in the seventeenth century |
| 1904 | Frederick Samuel Boas | The academic drama |
| 1906 | Alexandre Beljame | Shakespeare as criticised in France from the time of Voltaire |
| 1907 | William Everett | The English orators of the eighteenth century |
| 1909 | Arthur Woollgar Verrall | The Victorian poets |
| 1911 | Walter Raleigh | The prose writers of the Romantic revival |
| 1912 | William Paton Kerr | Chaucer |
| 1914 | Adolphus Alfred Jack | Chaucer |
| 1915 | Adolphus Alfred Jack | Spenser |
| 1921 | John C.ann Bailey | Life and art in English poetry |
| 1922 | Walter John de la Mare | The art of fiction |
| 1923 | Lascelles Abercrombie | The idea of great poetry |
| 1925 | John Middleton Murray | Keats and Shakespeare |
| 1926 | Thomas Stearns Eliot | The metaphysical poetry of the 17th century |
| 1927 | Edward Morgan Forster | Aspects of the novel |
| 1928 | André Maurois | Aspects of modern biography |
| 1929 | Desmond MacCarthy | Byron |
| 1930 | Herbert Edward Read | Wordsworth |
| 1930 | Harley Granville-Barker | Dramatic method |
| 1932 | Edmund Blunden | Charles Lamb and his contemporaries |
| 1934 | George Stuart Gordon | Shakespearean comedy |
| 1935 | Ernest de Selincourt | Wordsworth |
| 1936 | R. W. Chambers | English prose from Chaucer to Raleigh |
| 1936 | John Dover Wilson | [resigned] |
| 1937 | Herbert Grierson | Some of Shakespeare’s tragedies considered in relation to their sources and to one another |
| 1938 | Harold Nicolson | Some types of English biography |
| 1939 | Sir Walter Wilson Greg | The editorial problem in Shakespeare |
| 1940 | Etienne Henry Gilson | [resigned] |
| 1941 | George Malcolm Young | Religious and social ideas in nineteenth-century literature from Wordsworth to William Morris |
| 1942 | Lord David Cecil | Thomas Hardy, the novelist: a critical appreciation |
| 1943 | John Dover Wilson | The fortunes of Falstaff |
| 1944 | Clive Staples Lewis | Studies in sixteenth-century literature |
| 1945 | Raymond Mortimer | Five dissident Victorians |
| 1946 | Cecil Day Lewis | The poetic image |
| 1947 | Henry Buckley Charlton | Shakespearean tragedy |
| 1948 | Etienne Henry Gilson | [resigned] |
| 1948 | Robert William Chapman | Jane Austen: facts and problems |
| 1948 | D. Nicol Smith | John Dryden of Trinity College |
| 1949 | Helen Darbishire | The poet Wordsworth |
| 1951 | Frank Percy Wilson | Marlowe and the early Shakespeare |
| 1952 | Arthur Humphry House | Coleridge |
| 1953 | Bonamy Dobrée | The broken cistern: public themes in poetry |
| 1953 | George Macaulay Trevelyan | A layman's love of letters |
| 1954 | Robert von Ranke Graves | The crowning privilege: professional standards in English poetry |
| 1956 | James Runcieman Sutherland | English satirists |
| 1956 | Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary (read by R.M. Ogilvie) | Art and reality |
| 1958 | Veronica Wedgwood | Poetry and politics under the Stuarts |
| 1959 | Nevill Coghill | Shakespeare's "know-how" as a maker of plays: studies in Shakespearean dramaturgy |
| 1960 | E. M. W. Tillyard | Some mythical elements in English literature |
| 1960 | Sir Robert Birley | Sunk without a trace: some forgotten masterpieces considered |
| 1962 | George Wilson Knight | British drama |
| 1963 | Louis MacNeice | Varieties of parable |
| 1964 | Leslie Poles Hartley | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 1965 | John Hanbury Angus | Mark Pattison and the idea of a university |
| 1966 | Stephen Harold Spender | Aspects of British and American imagination since 1945 |
| 1967 | Frank Raymond Leavis | English literature in our time |
| 1968 | Muriel Clara Bradbrook | Shakespeare the craftsman |
| 1969 | Victor Sawdon Pritchett | Meredith in the English comic tradition |
| 1970 | Anthony Powell | [resigned] |
| 1971 | Lionel Charles Knights | Literature and politics in the seventeenth century |
| 1972 | Denis Wyatt Harding | Form and uses of rhythm in English Literature |
| 1973 | Frank Templeton Prince | Makers and materials : the poetry of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, and Eliot |
| 1974 | William Empson | The progress of criticism |
| 1975 | Ivor Armstrong Richards | The eye and ear in reading poetry: some futures for criticism |
| 1976 | Jacob Bronowski | [died] |
| 1977 | Donald Alfred Davie | The literature of dissent 1700-1930: the non-conformist contribution to English culture |
| 1978 | David Towry Piper | Poets and their portraits |
| 1980 | Tom Stoppard | The text and the event |
| 1982 | Charles Tomlinson | Poetry and metamorphosis |
| 1983 | Geoffrey H. Hartman | The poetical character: four studies |
| 1984 | Dr Jonathan Miller | Limited visibilities, or the mind's eye |
| 1985 | C. Henry Gifford | Poetry in a divided world |
| 1986 | Geoffrey Hill | The enemy's country |
| 1987 | Richard Rorty | Irony and solidarity |
| 1988 | Jerome McGann | Toward a literature of knowledge |
| 1989 | Barbara Everett | Getting things wrong: tragi-comic Shakespeare |
| 1990 | Toni Morrison | Studies in American Africanism |
| 1991 | Christopher Ricks | Victorian lives: aftersight and foresight |
| 1992 | Sir William Golding | [resigned] |
| 1992 | Derek Walcott | [resigned] |
| 1993 | Bernard Williams | Three models of truthfulness |
| 1994 | V. A. (Del) Kolve | The God-denying fool in medieval art and drama |
| 1995 | Alison Lurie | The Children's Books of John Masefield |
| 1996 | Stephen Orgell | Imagining Shakespeare |
| 1997 | Donald McKenzie | William Congreve |
| 1998 | Carlo Ginzburg | No island is an island: four glances at English literature in world perspective |
| 1999 | John Hollander | The substance of shadow: a darkening trope in poetic history |
| 2000 | Sir Peter Hall | Exposed by the mask: four lectures on form in drama |
| 2001 | Helen Vendler | Poets thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats |
| 2002 | Adrienne Rich | Six meditations in place of a lecture; poetry reading with commentary |
| 2003 | Anne Barton | The Shakespearean Forest |
| 2004 | Peter Brown | Treasures in Heaven: Religious giving in late Antiquity |
| 2005 | Rowan Williams | Grace, Necessity and Imagination: Catholic Philosophy and the Twentieth-Century Artist |
| 2006 | Seamus Heaney | Stance and Distance: A Reading with Commentary |
| 2007 | Elaine Scarry | Imaging Colour |
| 2007 | Frank Kermode | Some Lesser-Known Aspects of E. M. Forster |
| 2009 | Roy Foster | ‘Words Alone are Certain Good’: Literature, Nationalism and Politics in nineteenth-century Ireland |
| 2009 | Roger Chartier | Forms Affect Meaning |
| 2011 | Susan Wolfson | Temporal disjunctions: relating personal history |
| 2012 | Quentin Skinner | Shakesperean invention |
| 2014 | Adam Phillips | Becoming Freud:
the Psychoanalyst and the Biographer |
| 2015 | Paul Muldoon | Yeats and the Afterlife |
| 2016 | Mary Carruthers | The Art of Invention |
| 2017 | Alice Oswald | Falling Awake: a Lecture-Reading |
| 2019 | Professor Andrew Cole | Unmodernism
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