Re: Library Of America Twentieth Century Poetry
Vinnie Breidenthal
In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy.
The collection is unprecedented in its textual and editorial authority, and includes biographical sketches of each poet and extensive notes. The editorial advisory board includes the very distinguished poets and scholars Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff.
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These collections include the Children's Books Collection; the Irish Collections (including the James F. Spoerri Collection of James Joyce, the W. B. Yeats Collection and the P. S. O'Hegarty Collection); The William Doremus Paden Collection of Tennyson; the Elizabeth Morrison Snyder Collection of H. L. Mencken; the New American Poetry Collection; the Rainer Maria Rilke Collection; and the Science Fiction Collections.
The collection (founded in 1953, and built almost entirely through gifts) does not attempt to furnish the reader with the great classics of children's literature although it does include most of the Kate Greenaway books and about half of Beatrix Potter; it presents the common fare and offers great scope for research in the history of education as well as in literature and social history.
A collection of over 900 James Joyce items. The collection is unusually complete in printed material in both book and periodical form, including all first editions of Joyce's works except five minor items printed for copyright purposes which exist in only one, two, or three copies.
In 1953 the Library acquired from the Chicago attorney and book collector James F. Spoerri his collection of James Joyce, commencing what has proved to be a continuing interest in the literature and history of Ireland. This collection of over 900 items is unusually complete in printed material in both book and periodical form, including all first editions of Joyce's works except five minor items printed for copyright purposes which exist in only one, two, or three copies. It contains nearly all the books and pamphlets devoted entirely to the author and his works and over two hundred books and periodicals containing critical and biographical material.
Particularly uncommon items in the Joyce collection are copies of the two broadsides, The Holy Office (1904 or 1905) and Gas from a Burner (1912), the latter bearing in holograph the author's story of the destruction of the first (Dublin) edition of Dubliners. Also present are all three states of the first edition of Ulysses (1922), as well as a copy of the first edition of Ulysses in French, signed by Stuart Gilbert, who oversaw the translation, and inscribed by Joyce to his daughter Lucia on the date of issue; this copy has the novelty of bearing the strange post-mortem bookplate of the author. There is also a copy of the elusive Pomes Penyeach (Cleveland, 1931).
Elizabeth Morrison Snyder became a Mencken collector in 1951 when she acquired a substantial collection of letters from critic, editor, and essayist H.L. Mencken to Charles Driscoll and a group of inscribed editions of his books. In the two decades which followed, she built a collection of remarkable balance and completeness, with some 250 Mencken letters, seventy-five inscribed editions of his books, files of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, and an extensive collection of ephemera written and published by Mencken.
Presented to the Library in 1971 and increased since by further gifts from Mrs. Snyder, the collection includes the rare Ventures into Verse of 1903 (two of the thirty-seven known copies, one inscribed to the illustrator, Charles Gordon, and later to Frank Hogan), George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905), A Little Book in C Major (1916), and extensive files of Mencken's newspaper columns.
The New American Poetry collection (then named the Literary Ephemera collection) was founded in 1963 with the goal of preserving the ephemeral productions of local anti-establishment poets. The collection has evolved to document a particular set of movements in post-World War II American poetry. These publications appear sometimes in fugitive and fragile forms and at others in fashionable limited editions and stem mainly from four schools:
The New American Poetry Collection includes the library of Max Douglas, a promising young KU poet who died in 1970 at the age of 21. The Douglas Collection, presented to the Library by the poet's father in 1982, is strong in the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, and includes Douglas's own posthumously published poems.
In addition to printed items (books, periodicals, broadsides and ephemera), the Spencer Research Library also holds significant manuscript materials for several post-World War II poets and/or associated countercultural writers.
Guides to many of these collections are available in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library online finding aids. For those without online finding aids, please contact the curator for additional information.
In addition to the writers' papers mentioned above, the Spencer Research Library holds a series of smaller manuscript collections for post-WWII poets. These collections contain correspondence, manuscript drafts, and notebooks, and the writers represented include Tom Clark, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jim McCrary, and Charles Plymell (represented by a much smaller amount of material: Paul Blackburn, Robert Branaman, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Jeff Nuttall, Charles Olson, Tom Raworth, Ed Sanders, and Jonathan Williams). Online finding aids exist for some of these collections, while others are inventoried through paper guides available in the Spencer Research Library's Reading Room.
In 1959 the University of Kansas acquired the remainder of the library of P. S. O'Hegarty, former Secretary of the Irish Post Office and an avid book collector, from whom the Yeats Collection had already been acquired. The 25,000 items of this purchase, the greater part of which is now housed as a group in the Department of Special Collections, immeasurably strengthened our resources in Anglo-Irish literature and history, giving rise to new interests and new courses.
The Irish literary renaissance figures other than Yeats are here in profusion: the Abbey Theatre plays; an extensive group of Abbey Theatre programs, more than 160 of them ranging from 1904 to 1922; the plays of Lady Gregory and of Synge; the complete output of the Dun Emer and Cuala presses, including the broadsides and other ephemera; books and periodicals reflecting this national literary movement.
Irish history, from the 17th century to the revolutionary movements of the 20th century, is extraordinarily well-represented, with newspapers, propaganda pamphlets, broadsheets, local history publications, songs, and scholarly works. Indeed the Irish holdings of the O'Hegarty library, taken together with the Joyce collection, the Sean O'Casey publications given to the Library by Franklin D. Murphy, former Chancellor of the University, and the earlier Irish writers already in the collections, give Kansas outstandingly strong Hibernian resources.
In addition to its Irish riches, the O'Hegarty Library contains excellent holdings in 19th and early 20th century English literature, and children's literature, especially 19th century boys' books and magazines.
The late Dr. Henry Sagan was an indefatigable collector of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and in 1963 the Library acquired his entire collection. The nearly 1,600 items are first editions of all of Rilke's works in an astonishing number of issues and states including such rarities as the Zwei Prager Geschichten (Stuttgart, 1899), and two copies of Die Letzten (Berlin, 1902); later editions, both text and critical; translations; bibliographies; criticisms of Rilke's work; the works of authors who influenced Rilke and the works of his disciples. A particularly interesting portion of the collection, the acquisition of which must have taxed all of Sagan's collecting energies and ingenuity, is the large number of fugitive publications: periodicals in which Rilke was published or reviewed, newspaper articles, offprints, photographs, and ephemeral material. The collection has given rise to an international Rilke conference and a number of publications.
An extensive collection (with particular strength in the "Golden Age" of Science Fiction) consisting of books, periodicals, and the papers of writers including Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Donald A. Wollheim, and Lloyd Biggle. This collection has been built almost entirely by gift.
In 1979, the Department was bequeathed the library of Prof. W. D. Paden of the KU English Department, completing a gift begun in 1972. Particularly important in the Paden gift are his remarkable Tennyson collection with its rich resources for the bibliographical history of Tennyson's publications, and his strong holdings in the Pre-Raphaelites and A. W. E. O'Shaughnessy.
A premier W. B. Yeats collection containing all but two of his works in first edition, numerous periodical publications, and several score of books from his personal library (including copies of his own works with his annotations) or having close association in one way or another with the Yeats family.
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