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]
