Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

  • 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.

  • New Scholarship: Lukas Moe on George Oppen

    November 15, 2021

    Moe, Lukas. ““Not anyone’s Eden”: A Critical Introduction to New Poems by George Oppen.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 43 no. 4, 2020, p. 18-44. From the...