Until his death in 1985, Robert Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1984 he was named the poet of the Library of Congress. He published four volumes of his own poetry, and translations, with Dudley Fitts, of Alcestis, Antigone, and Oedipus Rex, in addition to his Illiad, Aeneid, and Oedipus at Colonus.
