The new Poetry Room in Widener was established in the hope that it might develop an interest in poetry amongst the undergraduates. There has long been a need at Harvard for something that will give a cultural background such as no course can provide. Only in so far as it can fulfill this purpose may the existence of a poetry room be justified.

As the room exists, there is no possibility for the realization of this project. There is the excellent Amy Lowell collection of first editions and manuscripts. But these are behind glass or within a steel vault, and therefore, beyond the reach of the casual reader. The Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow library of American poetry consists of all the debris of Victorian poetic effort. Of the modern poetic output on the shelves, whatever is worth reading is so hidden in the mass of exercises in versification, that it evades all discovery. Beyond this there are also two sets of the novels of Scott, five lives of Nelson, a four volume life of Napoleon, and various works of fiction by Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling and others. The relation of these to poetic interest is obscure.

If the Poetry Room is to become a museum of first editions or for the forgotten verses of the later nineteenth century, the avowed purpose of the project is set at naught. But if it is to encourage an interest in poetry the admittedly valuable prose work must be relegated to another section of the library, the modern verse must be carefully selected and the collection of the masters greatly enlarged. The austerity which inevitably walks with first editions must be scrupulously avoided, and in its place must come the informal atmosphere which fosters literary enjoyment.