Five professors of English will be on sabbatical or leave of absence in 1968-69, Walter Jackson Bate '39, chairman of the English Department, said yesterday.

Warner B. Berthoff '47 and David D. Perkins '51, professors of English, and Bate, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Humanities, plan to take sabbaticals. Reuben A. Brower, professor of English, and Walter J. Kaiser, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, will be on leaves of absence.

Bate said he will write a book on 18th century literature. Berthoff has a Guggenheim Fellowship to write on the "general connections between literary form and religious and sectarian literature," he said yesterday.

Perkins has accepted an invitation to be a visiting lecturer in Germany at the University of Gottingen. "I also plan to work on my book on the sublime and to read extensively in modern German poetry," he said yesterday.

Brower will spend next year at Oxford on a Fulbright Fellowship. He will lecture on English and finish a book on Shakespeare. Kaiser plans to use his leave to finish a book on Spenser.

Returning to the English Department after a year away will be Morton W. Bloomfield and John M. Bullit '43, professors of English, James Craig LaDriere, professor of Comparative Literature, and John L. Sweeney, curator of the Farnsworth and Poetry Rooms. Bloomfield will take over as head of the department.