Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Louise Glück, Nobel laureate and beloved Yale mentor

    October 13, 2023

    Louise Glück, a poet whose evocative voice shaped the literary world for decades, earning her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, and who became a beloved teacher and mentor as a member of the Yale faculty, died Oct. 13 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80.

  • Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry (Connecticut Public Radio)

    February 22, 2023

    Yale University has announced that Joy Harjo is the winner of the 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry. The biennial prize is awarded to an American poet for the best book of poems published in the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Harjo won on both counts—for her book Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. This after being U.S. Poet Laureate between 2019 and 2022.

  • Festival encourages writers of all stripes (The Beacon)

    February 21, 2023

    As part of this year’s CityLit Festival, Joy Harjo (left), the winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a reading of her poetry and conversing with a local poet on Tuesday, March 28, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater.

  • Joy Harjo photo courtesty of MasterClass

    Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for Poetry

    February 14, 2023

    Joy Harjo has been named the winner of Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The Bollingen Prize, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by Yale University Library through Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The prize includes a cash award of $175,000.

  • 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...