Poetry Scrapbooks: An online archive
Compiled and Edited by Mike Chasar

“To have great heroic poetry we need great readers.” 

— Walt Whitman

Between the Civil War and World War II, poetry scrapbooking was a common activity for people of all ages, classes, and genders in the United States.  Extending the creative and intellectual tradition of commonplace book keeping into the modern era, these personal anthologies are a partial and fascinating window onto Americans’ reading practices and literary tastes from the period. 

Poetry saturated American print culture during this time.  It appeared in newspapers, magazines, autograph books, classrooms, songbooks and advertisements.  It was posted on billboards and broadsides and broadcast on old-time radio.  It was printed on a host of ephemeral consumer goods ranging from postcards to calling cards, playing cards, matchbooks, posters, calendars, menus, pin-ups and even souvenir pillows, handkerchiefs and table runners! 

Editing their way through this print landscape, authors like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Jack London, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath kept scrapbooks.  Many of their collections have been preserved in libraries and are available to the public.  The same can’t be said for the personal anthologies kept by more ordinary readers, however, which have by and large escaped scholarly notice.  This online archive is designed to bring some of those compilations of verse into public view—many for the very first time. 

To browse these scrapbooks, just click on the links below.