Free Verse

Ever since Nicholas Boylston endowed a chair in rhetoric and oratory at Harvard with -L-.1,500 in 1771, its ten distinguished holders, starting with John Quincy Adams, have been charged to pursue excellence "in the theory and practice of writing and speaking well, that is, with method, elegance, harmony, dignity and energy." Last week Harvard assigned the chair to methodical, elegant, harmonious, dignified, energetic Robert Stuart Fitzgerald, 54, poet, journalist, anthologist and translator of the classics.

The Boylston chair has now gone to four poets in succession: Fitzgerald's predecessors were Robert Hillyer, who retired in 1944 and died in 1961, Theodore Spencer, who died in 1949, and Archibald MacLeish, who retired in 1962. It is one of the Ivy League's most informal posts, permits its holder to make of it what he will. Fitzgerald has no doubt at all about what he intends to do with it. "I am a writer and have writing to do, and I'm going to do it," he says. He is just finishing a critical anthology of the verses of the late James Agee, with whom he studied under Hillyer in the early '30s.* Legend says that the chair also confers upon the professor the exclusive right to tether a cow in Harvard Yard. But that, says Fitzgerald drily, "is a matter that each succeeding Boylston Professor must decide for himself." No farmer, he.

Fitzgerald is best known for his fast-paced, soaring 1961 translation of Homer's Odyssey. He has written three books of his own wide-ranging poetry, but in recent years, living in Italy, he has devoted himself largely to critical writing and visiting lectures at U.S. colleges. A graduate of Choate and Harvard and a student at Cambridge's Trinity College, he worked for the New York Herald Tribune before joining TIME from 1936 to 1949, mainly as a book reviewer. He went to Harvard's English department to lecture on comparative literature only last fall, considers his new position ideal. "Only by a favorable conspiracy of circumstances --and in this case a great university --can a man in my position devote himself to verse," he says. What grace the conspiracy may bring is suggested by his poem of the early '30s, "Winter Night":

The gray day left the dusk in doubt. Now it is dark. Nightfall and no stars are out, But this black wind will set its mark Like anger on the souls that stir From chimney side or sepulcher.

From hill to pasture moans the snow. The farms hug tight Their shaking ribs against the blow. There is no mercy in this night Nor scruple toits wrath. The dead Sleep light this wind being overhead.

*Three of these men--MacLeish, Agee and Fitzgerald--wrote at one time or another for Time Inc. magazines.

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