Harvard may already graduate some of the best and brightest, but yesterday afternoon's Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises honored those graduating seniors whose academic achievements exceeded even Harvard's typical standard of excellence.

"This is an honor that carries with it no tangible prize," said Professor of English and Comparative Literature James Engell '73, who is the president of the society's Alpha Iota chapter. "It is similar to...an achievement much like a laurel, so to replace it with something concrete would be to devalue it."

"The honor is not to help build a resume but rather is the result of an intellectual one," Engell added.

Engell said that Phi Beta Kappa is the only College-wide honor society which selects its members solely on the basis of academic merit. The honorees are selected based on their GPA and on letters of recommendation.

About 168 graduating seniors were honored in the ceremony, the majority of whom had been notified of their selection only a week before.

Twenty-four of those honored yesterday were inducted in the spring of their junior year. Another 48 students became members of the society this previous fall. The remaining students were officially inducted in a private ceremony earlier yesterday morning.

"It's definitely a high honor," said J. Ryan Clark '97, an environmental science and public policy concentrator who was inducted yesterday. "All these years, I have admired the students around me for their intellect, so it is very exciting to be considered among them."

Vikaas S. Sohal '97 said he agreed with Clark.

"It's always a good thing to be elected," said Sohal, an applied math concentrator who was inducted yesterday. "I've had a good time [at Harvard] and tried to work fairly hard. I've taken classes that I enjoy so that helps to explain why I've done well in them."

Along with music by the commencement choir, the exercises featured a poem by Patrick Muldoon and an oration by Anne L. Fadiman '75, traditional features of the centuries-old literary exercises.

Muldoon, professor and member of the humanities council at Princeton and the 1994 winner of the T.S. Eliot '09 prize for poetry, said that composing a poem for the occasion was "a daunting task" because he wanted the poem to be appropriate for an academic setting.

"I have attempted to write a poem about my father who at 11 or 12 hired himself out at a hiring fair as essentially a glorified slave to a farmer," Muldoon said, before reciting his "Third Epistle to Timothy."

In the oration that followed, "Procrustes and the Culture Wars," Fadiman urged seniors "not to take sides in the culture wars...a peculiar development which takes culture and tries to squish it down to one line, stretching from right to left."

Fadiman likened the culture wars--which ask individuals to define themselves in black and white terms--to Procrustes, a figure in Greek mythology.

According to legend, Procrustes used his bed to measure passers-by and would cut off the body parts of those who were too big for his bed or stretch the bodies of those who were too small to fit the dimensions exactly.