Poet Robert Lowell Will Receive Honorary Degree

Act Robert Lowell, visiting professor of English, will be awarded an honorable degree at Commencement exercises on Thursday, over the objections of early half of the Board of Overseers.

Reliable sources said this week that President Pusey intervened on Lowell's half at a recent meeting of the Overseers because the board had divided of over Lowell's selection and appeared to be headed for a stalemate.

Recommendations for honorary degrees are made by the Corporation (the President and Fellows of Harvard College), but must be approved by the overseers. Recommendation by the Corporation is usually tantamount to election.

Lowell, who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, has actively opposed this country's intervention in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. He has organized mass "read-outs" against President Johnson's foreign policy and signed several positions asking for U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

In June 1965, Lowell declined President Johnson's invitation to a White House arts festival. Lowell wrote, in a letter to the President, that he viewed Johnson's actions with "dismay and distrust." He claimed that he could not accept the invitation in good conscience. "Every serious writer," he said, "knows that he cannot enjoy such public celebration with-out making subtle public commitments."

A conscientious objector during World War II, Lowell served a five months sentence in 1943-44 after he pleaded guilty to charges of violating the Selective Service Act. In his poetry, Lowell has written mockingly of that confinement and of those months spent as a patient in the McLean Hospital in Belmont.

Lowell's Harvard teaching career began in 1958, when he was a special lecturer for the summer session. He has taught here irregularly since, often giving two seminars a term and commuting from New York City.

During this past year, Lowell taught English S, an advanced writing course, and English 285, "The Craft of Poetry." Both courses were over-subscribed.

Lowell was a serious contender for the Oxford University poetry chair in February, but was defeated in the final balloting by Edmund Blunden, a British poet.