A Cow for Spencer

In 1939, in a fit of economy, Harvard University fired a young poet and assistant professor of English named Theodore Spencer. Cambridge University promptly offered him a lectureship--but war broke before he could take it. Harvard, properly impressed, Lend-Leased him as a "visiting professor" from Cambridge. Last week, Harvard, which has been increasingly impressed by Ted Spencer since then, appointed him, at 44, to the prestigious, 140year-old Boylston Professorship of "Rhetoric & Oratory (first chairholder: John Quincy Adams; last: Poet Robert S. Hillyer).

Spencer, tall (a stooping 6 ft. 5 in.), strawberry-blond, and handsome, is a specialist in Elizabethan tragedy and modern poetry. Dressed in tweed jacket, grey flannels and loud bow tie, he grips his lectern and recites poetry in a flowing, resonant voice and a Philadelphia accent improved in Britain. Characteristic advice to students: to understand James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, "lie on your bed, hold the book over you, and let the words just pour down." Next year, to the two courses he now teaches to Harvard and Radcliffe students, he will add English V--the Boylston course in creative writing, limited to 20 select students (among its famed grads: Emerson, Thoreau, John Dos Passos, Walter Lippmann). As a full professor, Spencer will earn $9,600; the Boylston Chair itself pays only in prestige, though legend accords its holder the right to pasture a cow in Harvard Yard.

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