Cleanth Brooks papers (University of Toledo)Housed at the University of Toledo, The Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections. Summary: "Papers I cover the period from 1949-1977. They consist of twelve letters from Brooks to George Core, copies of the text of a 1949 radio interview, and two essays (1950 and 1958). The letters were written to Core between 1972 and 1977 when he was a member of the faculty of the University of Georgia. Core has edited several books including Regionalism and Beyond: Essays of Randall Stewart, with M. E. Bradford; The Southern Tradition at Bayby Richard Weaver; and Southern Fiction Today: Renascence and Beyond with essays by Walter Sullivan, C. Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (a Scholar's Library selection). Mr. Core served as editor of The Sewanee Review and has also written essays and reviews for a number of other journals including The Southern Review and The Georgia Review. The correspondence between the two writers begins with the December 23, 1972 letter in which Cleanth Brooks tells Core, "thanks for, what is really the most handsome of Christmas presents, your essay on my work." Brooks goes on to say, "I would like to explore with you further, privately, some of my speculations about the literary and cultural scene." In this letter and the remaining letters in the collection, Brooks tells Core about his plans for submitting articles for publication to The Sewanee Review and his other projects which include writing an American Literature textbook and a second Faulkner volume. Other topics range from presenting a paper at the Allen Tate birthday celebration in Sewanee, Tennessee in 1974 to the politics at Yale University. The text of the radio interview with Cleanth Brooks which aired on March 6, 1949 at Yale University is entitled, "Onslaught of Science and Technology May Lead to General Cultural Deterioration." The discussion centers on the future of the humanities and liberal education itself. The first essay in the collection, "The Crisis in Culture," originally appeared in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin on July 8, 1950. In it, Brooks discusses William Wordsworth's ideas on the standards of culture during his time and Brooks reveals his own thoughts on the significance of the arts, and especially the arts of language, in determining the health of a culture. The second essay entitled, "Modem Poetry: Its Aim and Its Spirit" was presented by Cleanth Brooks at a Yale alumni seminar in June of 1958. In this paper, he presents examples of works by various poets, together with his interpretation, for the purpose of determining if modem poetry can be called poetry.
Cleanth Brooks Papers II consists of twenty-one letters to Professor Walter Laurence Sullivan which date from November 29, 1963 through October 10, 1991.
Cleanth Brooks Papers III contains eleven letters (eight from Brooks and three from his wife, Tinkham) to Stuart Wright at Palaemon Press Ltd. in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They date from February 25, 1981 to November 23, 1985.