Miller Williams (1930–2015) wrote, edited, or translated more than 30 books and is best remembered for writing poetry in plainspoken language that captured meaning in everyday experiences. The Ransom Center recently acquired his archive, which documents the career and writings of this influential American poet.
[Read more…] about Ransom Center acquires archive of American poet Miller Williams
Kamran Javadizadeh, an assistant professor in the English Department at Villanova University, visited the Ransom Center this fall to conduct research for his current book project, “Bedlam & Parnassus: The Institutionalization of Midcentury American Poetry.”
The idea for Javadizadeh’s book began when he discovered that Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop could both see the U.S. Capitol from their very different positions in 1950—one was a patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital and the other the poet laureate. He argues that the combination of these two poets creates an understanding of what poetry meant culturally and societally in post-war America. While at the Ransom Center, Javadizadeh studied the Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound collections.
Javadizadeh’s work was jointly funded by the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship and the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies, as part of the Ransom Center’s fellowship program.
The Ransom Center is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its fellowship program in 2014–2015.
The Ransom Center recently acquired a collection of letters and photographs relating to novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), co-founder of The New York Review of Books and one of the most brilliant literary critics of the late-twentieth century. The newly acquired material complements Elizabeth Hardwick’s archive, which she donated to the Ransom Center in 1991.
This new material was acquired from Jon R. Jewett, a personal friend of Hardwick—or “Lizzie,” as her closest friends called her. They met in Castine, Maine, in the early 1980s, where Hardwick had a summer residence that she once shared with her former husband, the poet Robert Lowell.
The collection includes more than 20 handwritten letters from Hardwick to Jewett spanning their three decades of friendship. The letters showcase Hardwick’s sharp wit and are filled with details of her daily activities, reflections on current events, and kind words of advice for her friend. In a letter dated January 21, 1991, she writes of the Gulf War, “The situation is really bizarre indeed, no jobs and a war that is not over in a week, as expected. I can’t tear myself away from the TV, but I suppose the worst thing will be that it is all to become repetition, nothing new happening and so the great happening, the war itself, just becomes another little repetitive show.”
On April 10, 1994, in a letter peppered with typos, she offers valuable advice about editing and proofreading but self-reflexively notes, “I can’t proofread my own work. It’s embarrassing how many mistakes there are in something I have read more than a dozen times.” She concludes, “I am aware of all the mistakes in this letter, but it is a rush and even the typing room is such a mess I can hardly see the page.”
The correspondence in the collection is supplemented with a number of photographs and candid snapshots—including one of a frail but smiling Lizzie taken just days before her death in 2007.
Please click on thumbnails below to view larger images.
