Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Richard Wilbur published his first poem, "Puppies" in 1929 in the children's magazine John Martin’s Book at the age of 8. In the eighty years since, Wilbur, Poet Laureate from 1987-1988, has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and outlived more famous poet contemporaries like John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. These poets' Confessional style caught fire mid-century and signalled a departure from the measured poetry Wilbur was writing. A Wilbur poem foregoes the stormy revalations of the Confessionalists; more often it betrays instead the delight and solace to be found in the things of this world (not for nothing the name of Wilbur's National Book Award-winning third collection). Today he is widely recognized today as a master of the form, a spinner of traditionally-crafted verse both as strong and subtle as silk.

Wilbur is a talented assembler of images. As a case study, observe how Wilbur evokes dusk in three very different poems: "Cicadas," "As it Is" and "Leaving". The poems exult in rituals both bucolic and urban: a chorus of crickets nestled in leaves with "thick-tongues" break open a still summer night; a city bus ferries passengers hovering over their crossword puzzles through dark streets to their homes; and at a garden party, the tilting shadows of guests saying their goodbyes fade in honeyed light.

Wilbur's poetry can be acrobatic; the lines simultaneously restrained and soaring. He writes in verse, but so effortlessly that the reader may not always notice that his lines follow a formal meter. His poetry calls to mind the horsepower and dazzle of a Shawn Johnson balance beam routine: at moments heart-stopping, but with the quiet technical precision required of a narrow run that demands flawlessness. To read Wilbur is to see the world differently, and to appreciate the rhythms and power imposed by meter. Take the new poem, “The House” , printed in a recent issue of the New Yorker. As with many a Wilbur poem, the narrator explores the liminal state between sleep and consciousness. Here, the "I" of the poem tenderly imagines his lover's dream visions of a white house, and wonders whether she has yet arrived. The poem achieves added poignancy when turning to Wilbur's own life and to to the recent passing of his wife of 65 years, Charlotte Ward Wilbur, in 2007.

Wilbur is a poet that I’ve come to read only recently, in the process of cataloguing a collection of his works acquired from bookseller and bibliophile Robert A. Wilson (1922-), the former proprietor of the Phoenix Book Shop. Virtually all of the Henry A. and Albert W. Berg Collection's printed Richard Wilbur material is inscribed from Wilbur to his friend Bob Wilson.

Wilson took over the Phoenix at 18 Cornelia Street (later relocated to 22 Jones Street) in 1962, after retiring from a position as office manager at a cuckoo clock factory, and remained there until it closed in 1988. The Phoenix was one of those treasure-rich New York Bookstores frequented and beloved by neighborhood writers living in Greenwich Village, and those like Wilbur who traveled greater distances. Regular customers included Marianne Moore, Edward Albee, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Alice B. Toklas, and William S. Burroughs (who inscribed the guestbook with one of his cut-ups). The poet Diane de Prima sometimes worked the counter. Wilson nurtured relationships with his famous customers and published some of their work himself in small editions of poetry under the Phoenix imprint, the Oblong Octavo Series, which he sold at the store. The New York Public Library has Oblong Octavo editions of poems by Amiri Baraka, Galway Kinnell, James Merrill, and Louis Zukovsky, among others.

For Wilson's own account of his tenure at the Phoenix Book Shop, check out Seeing Shelley Plain (in addition to anecdotes about Moore, Toklas, Pound and others, you'll meet a pair of saber-tooth tigers originally introduced to Wilson by the novelist Glenway Wescott). The Phoenix was enough of a fixture in New York to spur the poet Robert Bly to publish his playful "Pheenix Book Shop List No. 69-Association Items", a tongue-in-cheek list of imagined realia hawked by the store. Bly's list includes an envelope of Tennessee William's moustache clippings and a pork chop bone nibbled on by Allen Ginsberg.

A good place to start with Richard Wilbur's poetry is his Collected Poems, 1943-2004. Wilbur is also an acclaimed translator of Voltaire, Moliere and Racine. In 1956 the libretto he wrote for Leonard Bernstein's comic-opera version of Candide was produced on Broadway. Wilbur's copy of the Random House edition of the operetta inscribed to Wilson will be on display in the New York Public Library's upcoming exhibition, "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success", opening on October 23.

Photo of Robert Wilson by Christopher P. Stephens - September 1979

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection has posted the finding aid for the William S. Burroughs Papers. A guide to the papers can now be accessed here.

The archive is a swirl of 1960s political, popular and literary culture, offering a close look at a cross-section of social revolutions that caught fire in the late fifties and sixties, including the rise of drugs, the gay liberation movement, free speech and the development of Scientology. Here too, are many of the era’s most innovative artists, thinkers and experimental writers. Burroughs's correspondents include Paul Bowles, Mary Beach & Claude Pelieu, David Budd, Truman Capote, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsburg, Rolf Gunter-Dienst, Lawrence Fehrlinghetti, Charles Henri Ford, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, David Prentice and Terry Southern. Also present is extensive correspondence with noted publishers Dick Seaver and Barney Rossett of Grove Press and Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press.

The archive offers an extensive record of the evolution of Burroughs’s cut-up method, wherein the author cut-up and randomly arranged fragments of text to create arbitrary phrases. Burroughs viewed the cut-up method as a corrective to the exertion of conscious thought on language, and saw it as a way to create texts that were fresh and spontaneous. Using this method, Burroughs created his “word horde”, a collection of texts from which he drew to create the novels Naked Lunch, The Ticket that Exploded, and Soft Machine (the archive devotes several folders to each, along with folders devoted to the word horde alone). Extensive correspondence with the painter Brion Gysin, who introduced Burroughs to his own visual cut-ups in Paris at the Beat Hotel in 1959 and inspired Burroughs to apply the method to texts, is instructive on technique and practice. Drafts and correspondence related to their book, The Third Mind, can also be found here.  read more »

Ever wonder what Jack Kerouac was doing at ages fourteen, fifteen and sixteen? Competing, for one. The author played on a neighborhood baseball team and was skilled enough in high school football that he was offered scholarships to play at both Boston University and at Columbia (he later accepted the New York school’s offer, a choice that ensured his path crossed with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, among others here).

As a teenager, Kerouac was also at work inventing his own fantasy field of dreams. In his free time, the young writer founded a complicated fantasy baseball league, as well as a Thoroughbred horseracing circuit. Kerouac recorded the rules, results, and player stats of both games in an extensive collection of broadsheets, cards, newsletters, and scorecards in the Jack Kerouac Papers, housed in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. These documents are the subject of a new book, Kerouac At Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, by Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection.  read more »

The plot of Linda Fairstein’s Lethal Legacy, set in the New York Public Library‘s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, pivots on a copy of a rare 1866 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1866 marks the year of the earliest approved edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, illustrated by Punch cartoonist John Tenniel. Copies of the 1866 edition in the New York Public Library are in the double digits. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of American Literature alone has seven copies, including Alice Pleasance Liddell’s copy of the book, bound and inscribed for her by the author.

Alice Liddell was one of three of the daughters of Dr. H.G. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford where Charles Dodgson (the pseudonymous Lewis Carroll) lectured in Mathematics. As the story goes, Dodgson, who sometimes photographed the sisters (in images famously scrutinized), took his subjects for a boat ride on July 4, 1862. The voyage was interrupted by a laze on the shore, where he was petitioned for a story. Thus, Alice was born.  read more »

Flannery O'Connor, who would have been 84 today, is best known for her dystopic portrayals of the South and Southerners in her novels Wise Blood, and The Violent Bear it Away, and in short stories like "The Displaced Person" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. She died in 1964 at the age of 39 from complications related to lupus. O’Connor’s characters were more often than not non-believers; folks you'd be more likely to see in the wee hours of Sunday morning by the side of the road than in the front pew. In her work, however, the author returned again and again to religious themes, drawing on extensive theological reading and her deep-rooted devotion to the Catholic Church.

O’Connor once wrote that the Comic might be the opposite of the Terrible, but in her writing, much of the bite and authenticity of her work was generated from a mixture of the two. Her stories were told as only O’Connor could, with an uncommon ability to parrot natural speech-- particularly the vernacular of Georgia-- pitch-perfectly, an off-kilter sense of humor, and affection for the creatures of the South, human and animal alike.  read more »