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College Archives & Special Collections: Modern Poetry Collection

Overview

The Modern Poetry Collection is a special collection of books, periodicals, and archival manuscripts of 20th century poetry available for use by students, poets, educators, and the general public. The creation of the Modern Poetry Collection was inspired by the 2011 bequest of a 2100-volume modern poetry library by the family of Frank C. Shuffelton. Frank Shuffelton was a Professor of English at the University of Rochester and a long-time summer resident of Harrisville, New Hampshire. Frank desired a place in the Monadnock region where his library could be shared and enjoyed by the community, and serve as a learning resource for poets and students of literature.
 
Housed in the Archives & Special Collections of Wallace E. Mason Library, the Modern Poetry Collection consists primarily of 20th-and-21st-century American and Canadian poetry with selections of non-English poetry in translation. Mason Library places a collecting interest in poets, poetry, and small press publishers of the Monadnock region, New Hampshire, and New England. The Library also collects the works of children’s poets from the region (to complement the Children’s Literature Manuscript Collection).
 
The Modern Poetry Collection currently features: the Frank C. Shuffelton Library, a 2100-volume library of first and rare editions of works by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams, and a thousand more poets; the Zephyr Press Archives includes the records (50 linear feet) of Zephyr Press, one of the leading small presses, founded by Ed Hogan in 1980, that specializes in poetry in translation, particularly of the works of poets from Eastern Europe and East Asia. Zephyr Press is best known for publication of the first complete English translation of the works of the Russian poet Anna Akhtamova.  The Modern Poetry Collection includes the papers of former NH Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli, poet and Robert Lowell scholar William Doreski, poet and Worcester Review editor Rodger Martin, and the children’s poet Edwith Newlin Chase.

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