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The beginning of the Poetry Collection came at the end of an era in American book collecting. When Thomas B. Lockwood donated his private collection of rare books, he also specified that Charles D. Abbott be designated as Head of the Library. Under Abbott's direction and with his enthusiasm, "The Poetry Project," as it was then called, was begun in 1937. A very deliberate decision was made at that time to build a library of first editions of poetry published in English in the twentieth century. The narrow focus would make it possible to acquire books and pamphlets in great depth. Translations were included if the work were done by a poet, or if the author of the poems were modern. At the beginning, only British and American poets were collected, but it was not long before Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand poets were added to the acquisition lists. In 1939, the Poetry Project received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Abbott, along with Mary Barnard, who served as the first Curator from 1938-1943, began the process of purchasing volumes of poetry. Records indicate that both traveled to book stores anal wrote letters extensively in search of wanted titles. Books were not expensive at this time, so copies of Pound's A Lume Spento (1908) and Yeats' The Wandering of Oisin (1889) came to the collection for under $20.00. Acquisitions continued, so that by the time Abbott retired in 1960, there were about 20,000 volumes in the collection. The books that define the best of modernist poetry, like Dylan Thomas' 18 Poems (1934), Wallace Stevens' Harmonium (1922), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and Marianne Moore's Poems (1921) are present along with thousands of less acclaimed volumes, like John Masefield's Salt-Water Ballads (1902), Sara Teasdale's Rivers to the Sea (1915), and Francis Thompson's Poems (1907). Today about 65,000 volumes by every major and a large number of minor poets writing in English in first and variant editions are shelved in the Poetry Collection.

Charles Abbott also began the serious collecting of little magazines. Later scholarship proved the wisdom of this initiative, for the course of a poet's career often moves from obscure, little magazines to the public, well-known ones. Following this early lead, the Poetry Collection now holds about 3,500 titles of magazines, including 1,100 current subscriptions. There is a catalog of current holdings, which is updated and printed every two months for researchers' convenience.

Early in the life of the Poetry Project, the decision was also made to supplement the book collection with broadsides, poems on postcards, and poems printed in all manner of other illustrated, decorated, and photographic formats. At the present time, the Poetry Collection owns about 6,000 broadsides. The only other library with equally significant holdings of broadsides is the Harris Collection at Brown University.

Paralleling the first editions, little magazines, and broadsides, an extensive collection of literary anthologies is maintained on separate shelving. There is no other such self-contained collection in this country. It offers a unique opportunity for bibliographic and textual research to have direct access to over 7,000 volumes, which are otherwise usually difficult to locate.

The Poetry Collection, with its specialized sections, and complemented by the Contemporary Manuscripts Collections, now supports a broad range of research into the poetry written in English during the twentieth century. Bibliographic studies, textual analysis, and various types of literary criticism are examples of the kinds of scholarship that have depended upon the Poetry Collection's resources.