Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

  • Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)

    February 8, 2023

    On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.

  • How Janet Malcolm Created Her Own Personal Archive (LitHub)

    January 18, 2023

    It’s hardly coincidental that Malcolm was organizing her own archive around the same time that she began to explore writing about her life. In 2013, she sent her first shipment—59 boxes of assorted detritus—up to New Haven, where they would live at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To say that Malcolm organized her papers would be a stretch. In some cases, she simply emptied the contents of her filing cabinets into cardboard boxes. But elsewhere, she annotated letters and folders, leaving easter eggs and reminders for any future researcher that she was thinking carefully about what to include in her archive and, more importantly, what to leave out.

  • Beinecke Top Tens: The Waste Land

    October 25, 2022

    In honor of the centennial of T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land, here are ten Waste Land highlights from the Beinecke’s collections. 1...

  • III. Charting The Waste Land-Scape

    October 25, 2022

    The Waste Land can be thought of as a kind of “Land”-scape. As Pound predicted, the poem did indeed turn out to be “very important”: it has left an undeniable...

  • II. Publication Landmarks of The Waste Land

    October 24, 2022

    First Publication: The Criterion Za Zc96, Folder: Za.Zc96.1:1 This centennial marks The Waste Land’s initial publication in The Criterion , an English journal...

  • I. The Waste Land and the Dial Prize Dispute

    October 24, 2022

    “I shall shortly have ready a poem of about 450 lines, in 4 parts, and should like to know whether the Dial wishes to print it,” wrote T.S. Eliot to Scofield...

  • Celebrating The Waste Land's Centennial

    October 24, 2022

    When its famous first line—“April is the cruellest month”—first appeared in print, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land swiftly captured the attention of the literary...

  • Six faculty members honored for ‘transformational’ classroom instruction

    May 5, 2022

    Students who nominated the six Yale faculty members awarded this year’s Yale College teaching prizes on May 5 used many different adjectives to praise their instructors. But there was one overarching theme in their comments: All of the prizewinners were credited with being “transformational” in their students’ lives — in the classroom and beyond.

  • Open for Research: John Ashbery Collection of Artwork and Objects

    November 29, 2021

    The Beinecke Library has recently acquired a collection of artwork and objects collected by American poet John Ashbery. It includes paintings, glassware, ceramics, clothing, household objects, realia, printed material, collage materials, and other items of significance to Ashbery, some of which inspired his poetry or appeared in his published work.