The noted critic, Lionel Trilling, will deliver on Wednesday the first of six lectures he is to give at Harvard this spring. The subject of his lectures will be moral and literary concepts "sincerity and authenticity."

Trilling, this year's Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, has been at Harvard since September, meeting with students and working on the lectures which go with his post.

Since 1931, Trilling has been a professor at Columbia, where he received both his graduate and undergraduate education. In 1962. Harvard awarded him its honorary Doctor of Letters degree, citing him as a "wise teacher whose discriminating perception illuminates the potential of the truly liberal mind."

Trilling's critical works include The Liberal Imagination. The Opposing Self, and Beyond Culture Essays on Learning and Literature. He has also written a novel entitled The Middle of the Journey.

Sincerity and Authenticity

In his 8 p.m. talks at Lowell Lecture Hall, Trilling will trace the development of the idea of sincerity from its emrgence in the sixteenth century to the time it gave way to the idea of authenticity. He will try to explain the idea of authenticity "through description rather than definition," he said.

Charles Chauncey Still man 98 established the Norton professorship in 1925 in memory of Harvard's first professorof the History of Art. A special University committee chooses annually a man "of high distinction and, preferably, of international reputation" to fill the one year post.

The lectures he is asked to deliver must concern "poetry, the term being interpreted in the broadest sense to include...all poetic expression in language, music or the fine arts."

T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings have both held the post in the past.