Forget books, read all your poetry online!

The university launched an online catalogue of poet Douglas Dunn’s works last Thursday, commemorating the author’s 70^th birthday.

The launch, exciting English students to the core and provoking a passing thought to the rest of us, will improve access to the Dunn’s hand-written works for fans and scholars. The Dunn archive has a unique historical importance, as it may become one of the last paper archives to span the entire working life of a significant British writer acquired by a University Library.

The catalogue will give students and the public alike access to the poet’s most intimate works, and is fully searchable by the public, which can then request to access a particular poem or prose.

Now that every draft of his poetry is available to be read online, Dunn, the author of more than a dozen books and a former professor at St Andrews, commented on the constant reworkings: “I have always believed that one of the purposes of revision is to expunge anything tending towards sentimentality – anything tending towards over-statement or another form of sentimentality which is wilful under-statement. You simply have to get the tone right, you have to get the pitch right.”

For the very keen among us, the catalogue is available here.

Image courtesy of The Courier