Poetry & Poetics at Buffalo - Electronic Poetry Center - University at ...

department, with Al Cook's notion that all the dissertations
generated here could come out of the materials stored
there.-MH
In 1935, Charles Abbott, the first librarian of Lockwood Memorial
Library, laid the foundations for Buffalo's present status as poetic
center by deciding to focus resources on creating the broadest
possible collection of twentieth-century poetry in English. In 1939,
MarfBarnarrl was hired as the first curator ofthe collection, working
closely with Abbott. Together they set about collecting documents
from every aspect of poets' literary production, from notebooks and
worksheets to first published versions of poems, variant editions,
limited fine-press publications, and a range of other forms of printing
and reproduction. They wrote to thousands of poets requesting
the contents of their waste baskets, before other libraries had begun
to consider such documents valuable. Poets ranging from Auden to
Zukofsky responded, with letters and manuscripts, notebooks and
diaries. Today the Collection houses some 8 million individual
pieces of paper, by authors ranging from T. S. Eliot to Ted Enslin,
Helen Adam to Ed Dorn, and is known among scholars for its
extensive collection of works by James Joyce, Dylan Thomas,
Robert Graves, and William Carlos Williams.
In her book Assault on Mt. Helicon (Berkeley: DC Press, 1984),
Mary Barnard writes:
The idea that it was part of a university's business to collect
materials for research into the work of modern poets was ...
strange (not to say scandalous) to most American professors,
. including those on the DB campus.... No self-respecting
scholar would think of wasting his time on living writers.
Charles Abbott himself believed that the Collection would
come into its own "perhaps in a hundred years." The scholars
would begin to come when we were long gone, he said, but the
time to collect materials was the present. He was collecting
for posterity. Living poets would one day be dead, the present
would have become the past, the scholars would eventually
become interested, and by that time the materials they needed
would be much more difficult and expensive to obtain. This
was surely true. The fifty dollars we paid for Williams's little
pamphlet called simply Poems (Rutherford, 1909) seemed
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