Houghton Library has purchased the world's most impressive collection of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's manuscripts, William A. Jackson, director of Houghton Library, announced yesterday. The collection includes 350 poems in first drafts and revisions as Tennyson himself wrote them, Jackson stated yesterday in an announcement made by the library.

The library used income from a bequest of the American imagist poet, Amy Lowell, to purchase the manuscripts from the poet's grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson. Three-fourths of the approximately 650 drafts of the poems are in Tennyson's own handwriting.

All of the poet's celebrated works, from the earliest surviving poem, a verse translation of Claudian's "Prosperine," to his last work, "The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale," are in this collection, Jackson said. Only the manuscript of "Locksley Hall," now owned by Yale, is missing.

Some of the poems have never been published, and are therefore of especially great interest to historians and critics, Jackson said. An index of the collection will soon be published. By terms of the purchase agreement, the manuscripts will never be used to change or "improve" the accepted readings of the poems.

The Tennyson manuscripts are part of a wide variety of other works in English and American literature and history recently acquired by the Houghton Library, Jackson said. Earlier this week, the library announced the acquisition of rare editions of Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Erasmus, Dante, and other early writers.