LEWISTON – Bates College will begin its 152nd academic year with a convocation address by Robert Farnsworth, a member of the English faculty and a nationally known poet, at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6, on the college’s historic quadrangle.

The ceremony is open to the public at no charge. The rain site is the Alumni Gymnasium.

Farnsworth spent the summer as the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum and arts center housed in Robert Frost’s former homestead in Franconia, N.H. Farnsworth’s convocation address is titled “Three Lower-Case Virtues.”

He will join Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen in welcoming more than 500 new students to Bates, part of a student body totaling 1,872.

A Lewiston resident, Farnsworth has published two collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, “Three or Four Hills and a Cloud” (1982) and “Honest Water” (1989). His poems have appeared in such national publications as The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

From 1998 to 2004, Farnsworth served as poetry editor for The American Scholar, the highly esteemed literary and intellectual quarterly of the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 1989, and has also won Bates’ Kroepsch Award for excellence in teaching.

As poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a farmhouse where the famed poet Robert Frost spent 19 summers, Farnsworth lived, wrote and offered public readings in July and August 2006. “I can think of no other writer I’d rather be haunted and inspired by than Frost,” he told the college’s alumni magazine last spring.

In past years, outside speakers have been invited to address convocations at Bates. Farnsworth’s address this year begins a new tradition of faculty speakers, a practice intended to emphasize the enduring importance of the student-faculty relationship to a Bates education.