Professor Elisa New and Larry Summers are very different people. “Larry is an extrovert and I’m an introvert; he likes sports and competition and I do not,” New tells the Independent. “We are in many ways a dramatic illustration of how opposites attract.”
Summers was President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. He served as the Director of the National Economic Council for the Obama Administration, and as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, among other senior public policy positions. He now teaches classes on the evolution and influences of globalization at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
New, on the other hand, is a professor of American Literature. She teaches courses bearing the titles “Poetry in America” and “Humanities in the High School Classroom,” where students read not the textbooks of economists, but rather the poems of great American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson. New notes the disparity between her and her husband’s intellectual interests: “Economics and English are fields based on very different assumptions and methods.”
Nevertheless, nearly 15 years of marriage have prevailed over all that difference. Indeed, difference is what brought the couple together, for New wouldn’t have met Summers without help from Natasha Lance-Rogoff and Ken Rogoff of the Economics department—the department perhaps overlapping the least with the field of English.
As New tells it, their meeting was a product of serendipity and a bundle of discovery. New had bumped into Lance-Rogoff, and a conversation ensued. “She knew that I had three children, so did Larry, and we’d both gotten separated in the last several months,” describes New. “She told me I’d find him funny and irreverent and warmhearted and she was so right. She predicted our children would end up liking one another—they love one another.”
After Lance-Rogoff’s encouragement, New sent Summers an email to ask him out. “Though he was not my direct supervisor, he was the President and I was a faculty member,” remarks New. “It is an interesting question whether we’d have dared to date today. I’d hope we could have managed that.”
New and Summers spoke for several nights on the phone before meeting at a Persian restaurant on Beacon Hill, called Lala Rokh. This was in 2001, the week after 9/11, and the first fall of Summer’s Presidency. The date got off to a rocky start: “He was quite late; I chose a restaurant he never in a million years would have chosen—and that also had no convenient parking,” describes New. But over the course of dinner, the sparks of an emerging romance rendered these troubles inconsequential. “We liked each other enough that I realized lateness was not a dealbreaker for me, and he accepted I might ask him to eat at inconvenient restaurants,” she remarks.
Like turned into love, and in 2005, New and Summers married. “Both of these discoveries [from our first date] continue to be a daily feature of life together,” says New, offering a poetic drop of wisdom: “Anything one discovers about a person in the first month, or even on a first date, is probably never going to change.”
New and Summers currently reside in Brookline with their six children, and their yin and yang personalities continue to complement each other. “Larry and I are both really passionate about the work we do,” she says. “We both work long hours and have big goals and we support each other in those.”
As a professor of poetry, New shared one of her favorite poems about love: William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say,” in which the speaker confesses to having surreptitiously eaten a box of plums from an icebox. They were “delicious / so sweet / and so cold,” and he simply could not resist. Believed by some readers to originally be a note from Williams to his wife, the poem “bundles essential wisdom for people in relationships,” says New. For life and love are precious, like a box of plums—or, for New and Summers, like Persian food at an inconvenient restaurant, the small discoveries marking the moment when love begins.
Mary Julia Koch ’23 (mkoch@college.harvard.edu) took Professor New’s course “Poetry in America” last semester, and she fell in love with poetry.