Professor Lowes, 71 Today, Will End Long Teaching Career at Harvard This Spring

James B. Munn '12,

Chairman of the Department of English

On learning of the retirement of Professor John Livingston Lowes, I can only say that our infinite sense of loss in the Department of English is mingled with admiration for his superb achievement as a scholar, and with gratitude for his generosity as a colleague and a friend. It has been given to few to probe the secrets of the poet's heart as it has been given to him. We can give him only our thanks, admiration, and praise, but I believe that his greatest and most lasting tribute will come from those poets whose works he has illuminated for us all--Chaucer, Coleridge, and Keats.

J. N. Douglas Bush

Associate Professor of English

For two years I clung to Professor Lowes's coat-tails, and for the last fifteen I have been sitting at his feet. It is difficult to speak directly of the loss involved in his retirement, but it may be said that he has quickened generations of students and in his writings he has bridged the gap between scholarship and criticism. He has made criticism learned and scholarship exciting. If any literary scholar of our time has raised a monument more lasting than bronze--and 'a stately pleasure-dome'--Professor Lowes has done so.

Kenneth B. Murdock '16

Professor of English

I honestly and sincerely think that Mr. Lowes has been one of the greatest teachers in the English Department and one of its greatest scholars, and that his going means an irreparable loss.

Howard Mumford Jones

Professor of English

The retirement of Professor Lowes will deprive the University of the active service of one of the greatest literary scholars of our time, one who has harmoniously blended the gift of erudition and the gift of criticism. He has touched nothing he has not adorned. His "Convention and Revelt in Poetry" is a milestone in criticism. His work as an interpreter of Chaucer is unique. In "The Road to Xanadu" he has shown how psychological insight, uniting with exact and discriminating scholarship, can illumine the creative imagination of poets.