This paper addresses the lecture as form, especially in the contexts of the history of literary criticism from about 1750 and of pedagogical practice. Beginning in the eighteenth century with the multiple mediations of Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Poetry of the Hebrews and working through a number of examples from subsequent centuries, I wish to explore how the spoken, embodied situation of the lecture has found its way (if it has…) into the textual tradition of literary critical commentary and thought. Lowth, for instance, dramatically insists that in poetry (as opposed to history or philosophy) we may behold ‘Virtue […] in her animated form’, and his lectures in general emphasise the presence in the place where he is giving them (namely, eighteenth-century Oxford) of a kind of felt communal reverence for poetry. I will seek to interrogate what sense, if any, can be made of ‘presence’ in this context, how important its cultivation in various forms may be both to literary criticism specifically and to teaching more generally, and how it may function, if at all, in a physically distanced world. I will conclude by reflecting on André Gide’s Découvrons Henri Michaux, the text of a lecture Gide was prevented from giving by homophobic crypto-fascist military veterans, and on our current, zoomified condition as literary critics and teachers.