Literary and Poetry Collections

The Rose Library is home to a globally significant collection of material related to modern and contemporary poetry and literature. These collections, which highlight the entire enterprise of literary production, include the papers of writers, poets, and critics, the records of publishers and presses, and rare books and literary manuscripts. Our expansive collections offer exceptional strengths in Irish literature, modern poetry, African American writers, Georgia and Southern writers, counterculture, and the Beats.

In our reading room, you are welcome to read Seamus Heaney’s letters, browse Ted Hughes’s library, see Flannery O’Connor’s childhood drawings, click through Salman Rushdie’s computer, and explore much more.

The Rose Library's literary collections are particularly strong in modern and contemporary literature, including the papers of:

• Former Poet Laureate of Great Britain Ted Hughes
• Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney
• Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie
• Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker

The Rose Library is also home to the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, an extensive collection of more than 75,000 volumes of English-language poetry. Additional poetry collections include the J. M. Edelstein collection of American poetry, which is particularly strong in Wallace Stevens and includes detailed holdings of works from Cummington Press, Abattoir Editions, Stone Wall, Windhover Press, and the Jargon Society. The Julius M. Cruse collection, which numbers more than 3,000 volumes of T. S. Eliot's printed works.

The Rose Library's manuscript holdings in literature and poetry are complemented by strong collections of rare books and printed materials, including British poetry of the Romantic Period, the 19th-century English novel, and the detective novel (e.g., the Glover-Greene Collection of Victorian Detective Fiction and the Sir Hugh Greene Collection).