Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library

Home to an unparalleled collection of 20th and 21st century English-language poetry materials, the Woodberry Poetry Room features a circulating collection of poetry monographs and anthologies, an encyclopedic array of poetry journals and magazines, a landmark collection of audio recordings, and the Blue Star collection of rare manuscripts, chapbooks and ephemera. Founded in 1931, in honor of Harvard alumnus, poet and scholar George Edward Woodberry (1855-1930), the Poetry Room is housed in the Lamont Library in a room originally designed by the renowned Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. The Woodberry Poetry Room celebrates poetry as an intellectual pursuit and sensory experience; as a textual encounter and an auditory phenomenon, as a solitary meditation and as a source of solidarity and social life. In the many roles that the Woodberry Poetry Room plays and the countless communities it serves, the room could be said to be an "enormous room" (to quote Harvard alumnus E. E. Cummings).