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When Charles Abbott began collecting first editions of British and American poets, he also began a determined effort to acquire the working manuscripts and letters of contemporary poets. At that time other libraries were not collecting these documents and private collectors had not yet entered the field. Abbott wrote several thousand letters to poets, famous and not so famous, asking literally for the contents of their waste baskets. Abbott was much interested in exploring the process of creating a poem and wanted to have the basic documents to effect this kind of literary study. In 1948, he edited a book, Poetry at Work, subtitled Essays on the Modern Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, which contained essays by such poets as W.H. Auden and Karl Shapiro that demonstrate Abbott's views about acquiring manuscripts and using them to explore the creative process.

Abbott's solicitations of letters and manuscripts brought responses from hundreds of poets, among them: Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Auden, David Gascoyne, Elizabeth Jennings, Hugh MacDiarmid, Thomas Merton, Alastair Ried, Winfield Townley Scott, Genevieve Taggard, Ruthven Todd, Henry Treece, and Louis Zukofsky. Those represented by large letter collections include: Lascelles Abercrombie, Richard Aldington, Robert Bridges, Cid Corman, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Richard LeGalliennc, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McCrath, Richard Middleton, John Crowe Ransom, W.B. Yeats, and Louis Zukofsky. Wallace Stevens responded by sending the working manuscript of his long poem, "The Man With the Blue Guitar"; Marianne Moore sent in smaller but still important manuscripts of poems. Other manuscript holdings have been added by later donations and purchases. Among these are letters and papers of Ralph Hodgson, Kathleen Raine, Stephen Spender, James Kirkup, W.D. Snodgrass, and Felicia Lamport. Also of particular significance are large holdings of Dylan Thomas, including the famous notebooks later used for the text of his Collected Poems published by New Directions in 1953; the 110 pages of drafts which make up the manuscript of "The Ballad of the Long-legged Bait"; a hundred more pages of notebooks and typescript documents, and a large number of letters. Further, there are substantial letter holdings of Ezra Pound; the files, records and manuscripts of Peter Russell's magazine Nine, as well as his own manuscripts; and the letters of Charlotte Mew, which have been used recently both for biographical studies and the edition of her collected poems.

The period since 1979 has been a productive one for the acquisition of letters, manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and other primary materials used for the study of individual poets and the literary history of the period. Tile papers of the British poet Ted Walker, with a large number of working drafts for individual poems, came as a donation, as did the literary archive of the American poet Anthony Ostroff. This includes the manuscripts and very interesting correspondence that went into the making of Ostroff's hook, The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964), which features symposia on eight poems by such poets as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Wilbur. With the archive of Peter Russell's Nine as precedent, the working papers of Kayak, a magazine edited by George Hitchcock, have been regularly acquired as each new issue appears. Supplementing this are the letters, files, accounts, and manuscripts of the Sand Dollar Press and the archives of Athanor, a little magazine edited by Douglas Calhoun, of Happiness Holding Tank, a little magazine edited by Barbara and Albert Drake, and of Truck Press, a press and magazine operated by David Wilk. The most recent acquisition of this kind of material has been the archive of Intrepid Press, a press and magazine directed by Allen DeLoach. The papers of these magazines and presses contain the financial records, publishing, and distribution records, as well as the correspondence and manuscripts of the poets published.

Five other distinct collections have also been added. A body of Theodore Enslin's correspondence and manuscripts came in a single purchase. Present are hundreds of letters from a wide variety of contemporary poets as well as thousands of pages of Enslin's working manuscripts, including those for Forms (1970-1974) and Synthesis (1975). The Edward Dorn papers feature the notebooks for the final book of Gunslinger (1975), as well as the notebooks for Hello, La Jolla (1978) and Yellow Lola (1981). These provide a unique record of how a long poem and two shorter books develop out of notebook notation. Adding interest to the Yellow Lola material is the evidence it provides of active collaboration with another poet, Tom Clark. The Dorn papers also include the correspondence, the drafts of the narrative, and the versions of the translations Dorn prepared with Gordon Brotherson for the publication of the book, Image of the New World (1979). The Helen Adam papers consist of both sides of her correspondence with Robert Duncan during the 1950s and 1960s and contain important information about the literary history and careers of both poets. The William Bronk papers include the letters between Bronk and Robert Meyer. This is the most sustained correspondence of Bronk's career and reveals details about books and poems germane to Bronk's poetry and prose. In support of the large body of concrete and visual poetry in the Poetry Collection, the archive of the Writers Forum in England has also been purchased. This collection of manuscripts includes the notes and drafts of work by Bob Cobbing, the founder of the Forum and one of the internationally known poets of the movement.

Three larger acquisitions, the papers of the American poet Robert Kelly, the archive of Jonathan Williams' small press, the Jargon Society, and the literary archive of the British poet Martin SeymourSmith have further augmented the manuscript holdings. Robert Kelly's papers contain approximately 50,000 pages of notebooks, drafts, and typescripts and are a fulfillment of Abbott's plan to present the working papers of a poet to students of literature. It is possible to trace Kelly's writing practice, his process of revision and selection, and so to approach a statement about his vision of the creative activity of the poet. There are also thousands of letters from a wide range of poets. The archive of the Jargon Society is a massive collection of the materials that make up the life and action of a small press. Beginning in the early 1950s, the press has produced more than ninety books and other publications of the most significant poets and writers from England and America. There are extensive files of letters and the manuscripts of the work submitted to the press by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Irving Layton, Kenneth Patchen, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, and many others. The archive includes the production materials for the books, financial records, posters, diaries, a large number of photographs of poets as well as the manuscripts and personal papers of Williams himself. The archive of Martin Seymour-Smith contains the working drafts, with numerous corrections and revisions, for all of his books, except the first one. Seymour-Smith is a poet as well as an editor and writer of prose, so there are multiple kinds of papers that will accommodate different types of research. In addition, since Seymour-Smith is a man of letters in touch with the writers of Britain, the correspondence in the archives not only supplies invaluable information about individuals but also presents views and facts useful for defining the literary history of the period.

Like the collection of modern poetry in English, the Contemporary Manuscripts Collections attract scholars and researchers from all over the world. Every week brings inquiries in the mail for information about a manuscript or requests for photocopies, routinely evidencing the importance of these materials to research and publication about modern poetry.