The William Carlos Williams Papers in the 21st Century

The history of the William Carlos Williams Papers in Yale Collection of American Literature at the Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is well known. In his essay, "The Williams Carlos Williams Collection at Yale," Curator Donald Gallup documented the collection's development, including Professor Norman Holmes Pearson's extraordinary efforts to build both a comprehensive collection of Williams's books and a rich archive of associated manuscripts and correspondence.¹ The core of the collection, acquired between 1940-1955, was supplemented in later years by associated materials; indeed the collection continues to grow as new materials are acquired (recent acquisitions include a collection of letters from Williams and his wife to family friend Dorothy Goodrich and an undated still life painting by Williams).² Long available to scholars for consultation in the Beinecke reading room, in recent years the Library has endeavored to make the collection more readily and easily accessible, especially to scholars working at a distance.

Beinecke Library archivist Molly Wheeler created a comprehensive collection finding aid in 2008, uniting numerous small acquisitions (identified by nearly 20 separate call numbers) into one single collection: the William Carlos Williams Papers, YCAL MSS 116.³ Wheeler's thorough and detailed description provides meaningful intellectual structure to more than 95 boxes occupying roughly 40 linear feet of stack space. The Williams collection includes a wide variety of archival materials: drafts of prose, poetry, and drama; notes for lectures and readings; correspondence with fellow writers, friends, and family members; portrait photographs and informal snapshots; personal papers such as calling cards and address books. Williams's writing process is documented in the range of manuscripts included in the Papers, from holograph, typescript, and composite drafts to notes jotted on scrap paper and on pages torn out of his prescription pads. The correspondence in the Williams Papers is equally significant, documenting the poet's friendships with many literary figures (Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, and publisher James Laughlin, to name but a few) and his mentorship of younger writers (including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov).

Wheeler's 2008 description and reorganization of the Williams Papers serve as a firm ground from which the Library has pursued several important digitization projects that make materials from the Williams Papers and related archival collections available to scholars in the library and at a distance online. The projects include complete description and scanning of the vast majority of the photographs in the William Carlos Williams Papers, and seamless online organization and access to both metadata and high-resolution image files.⁴ An Image Guide to the Williams Carlos Williams Papers points users to more then 400 documents from the archive, including, in addition to photographs, examples of manuscript pages, correspondence, drawings, and printed ephemera.⁵

Related archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature enrich the Williams Papers and the library's digital access tools reveal corresponding collections, extending the digitally available William Carlos Williams materials considerably.⁶ Just as scholars visiting the Library have long benefited from the chance to view Williams-related materials in archives of other writers, the Beinecke's Digital Library includes Williams's letters and related documents in the Ezra Pound Papers, the H.D. Papers, the Viola Baxter Jordan Papers, and others.⁷ New materials are scanned for inclusion in the Beinecke's Digital Library daily. The William Carlos Williams Papers digital projects simultaneously preserve and protect fragile archival documents and make them accessible in their entirety to scholars all over the world.