Harvard to Honor Life and Writings Of Robert Lowell

Harvard will commemorate Robert T.S. Lowell Jr. '39, the leading American poet and former Harvard lecturer who died last fall at the age of 60, with a poetry reading, library exhibit and memorial service tomorrow and Thursday.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop will deliver a Morris Greg Reading of both her own work and Lowell's in Boylston Hall at 4.30 p.m. tomorrow, the 61st anniversary of Lowell's birth.

At a reception following the reading, Houghton Library will open an exhibit of Lowell's papers containing working manuscripts and correspondences with other literary figures that will be on public display for the first time.

Friends of the late poet, including many Faculty members, will participate in a memorial service open to the public at Memorial Church, at 3 p.m. on Thursday. Walter Jackson Bate, Lowell Professor of the Humanities; Monroe Engel '42, senior lecturer on English; Robert S. Fitzgerald '33, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; and David D. Perkins '51, Marquand Professor of English and American Literature, will be among those to discuss Lowell's life and read from his works at the services sponsored by the English Department.

The department coordinated the three activities "to indicate our sense of the great loss his (Lowell's) death means for us all," Engel said yesterday.

Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947 and had been the Ralph Waldo Emerson Lecturer on English Literature at Harvard.