A University at Buffalo Libraries Special Collection, The Poetry Collection is a collection devoted to 20th-century poetry in English and English translation. Founded in 1937 by professor and poet Charles D. Abbott, the university's first director of libraries,[1] it was the first institutional repository in the United States to systematically collect modern poetry and contemporary poets' working manuscripts.[2] It was followed by similar collections at Yale University, Princeton University, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions.[2]

The Poetry Collection contains over 140,000 titles of Anglophone poetry, making it the largest poetry library of its kind in North America.[1] Also included in the collection are recordings of poets reading from their own works, poets' notebooks; letters and manuscripts; and 9,000 titles of past and current periodicals including literary journals and "little magazines".[1]

In addition, there are more than 150 named collections of poets' archives and manuscripts.[1] Best known is the James Joyce Collection, which was added to the Poetry Collection between 1950 and 1968 in six installments from four main sources.[2] Reproduced manuscripts from the collection in facsimile were compiled and published as The James Joyce Archive in 1978.[2]

Poet Robert Graves sold his manuscripts to the Poetry Collection in 1960.[2] In 2012, physics professor emeritus Jonathan Reichert gifted his father's personal collection of Robert Frost's archives as the Victor E. Reichert Robert Frost Collection.[3]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d "The Poetry Collection". University of Buffalo. Retrieved July 3, 2024.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Creating the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives: A Short History of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo". Information & Culture. 55 (3). July 2020. doi:10.7560/ic55304.
  3. ^ Seale, Lisa A. (Fall 2018). "An Interview with James Maynard". The Robert Frost Review (28): 58–61. JSTOR 26731488.
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