Eleanor Ross Taylor letters to Paul Collinge, 1999/2012

Access and use

Location of collection:
University of Virginia, Special Collections Dept.
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library
University of Virginia
P.O. Box 400110
170 McCormick Rd
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4110
Contact for questions and access:
POC: Special Collections Public Services & Reference Staff
Phone: (434) 243-1776
Fax: (434) 924-4968
Restrictions:

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred citation:

MSS 16687, Eleanor Ross Taylor letters to Paul Collinge, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Summary

Extent:
0.03 Cubic Feet 1 folder
Language:
English
Preferred citation:

MSS 16687, Eleanor Ross Taylor letters to Paul Collinge, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Background

Scope and content:

Letters and notes from Eleanor Ross Taylor to Paul Collinge and Mary Lyons (Heartwood Books). Also includes one program from Taylor's funeral and one from her husbands funeral (St Paul's Church, Charlottesville, Virginia) collected by Paul Collinge.

Biographical / historical:

Eleanor Ross Taylor (June 30, 1920 – December 30, 2011) was an American poet who published six collections of verse from 1960 to 2009. Her work received little recognition until 1998, but thereafter received several major poetry prizes. She was born in rural North Carolina in 1920. She enrolled at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with the poet Allen Tate and novelist Caroline Gordon. She graduated in 1940, and worked for a time as a high school English teacher. With the recommendation from Allen Tate, she was admitted to Vanderbilt University for master's work with Donald Davidson.

In 1943 she married short story novelist Peter Taylor. Like most women of her generation, Eleanor Ross assumed that marriage and a career were incompatible. In the 1950s, Peter Taylor was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, along with the poet Randall Jarrell. Eleanor Taylor had been writing poems for some time, and Jarrell became her critic and sponsor. In 1960, her first poetry collection, A Wilderness of Ladies, was published.

In 1998, she was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, which honors one or two poets each year "with reference to genius and need". She received the 2000 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, which honors a "substantial and distinguished career". In 2009, she was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was awarded the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize. In March 2010, her volume Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 received the William Carlos Williams Award for the year's best volume of poetry from a small or a university press. On April 13, 2010 the Poetry Foundation announced that Taylor would receive the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors poets whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition"; the prize was $100,000.

Source: "Eleanor Ross Taylor". Wikipedia. Accessed 7/7/2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Ross_Taylor

Acquisition information:
This collection was a gift from Paul Collinge to the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia Library.
Physical description:
Good.
Physical facet:
letters, notes, and funeral programs
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:
letters (correspondence)