Field Trip to the Bodleian Library

It is possible to pay for tours of the Bodleian Library, but you are only able to see items from the Special Collections if you can demonstrate a good reason and secure the appropriate passes.  The Bodleian is not a lending library, so any reading of texts that you do is done on-site.

Our tutor, Dr. Andrew Blades, used to work at the library and was able to pull some strings to see some special pieces from the library's collection.  We walked to the Bodleian Science Library and got to go into the basement past the signs that say "Staff Only."  Dr. Judith Priestman had about ten treasures laid out for us to look at.  Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures because of the copyright being owned by the university.  We read a draft of an angry letter by Ezra Pound complaining about the university, an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" edited by his wife Vivienne, lists of similes that Raymond Carver typed up, Edward Thomas's hand-written copy of his poem "The Rain," a poem by W.H, Auden, Thomas Hardy's original "The Darkling Thrush," and sketches by J.R.R. Tolkien.  The curator said that if we wanted to see Tolkien's actual manuscripts we'd have to go to a small, Catholic university in America called Marquette.  She was surprised when I said that Marquette was only ten minutes from my house.

Tony, Pam, Koti, and Anita heading into the library

What was most powerful about this experience was the reminder that poetry happens with people sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, that it's filled with cross-outs and questions, it rarely just pours out perfectly the first time.  By the time a poem makes it into an anthology many other processes have taken place first.