One aspect that I feel is overlooked by scholars is the fact that archivists have a very profound perspective of the collections they manage. The archivist should be the first stop in understanding a collection, not the last stop after the finding aid.
However most scholars (at least in my experience) have a very focused goal in mind when they approach an archives. They want a specific document, or papers concerning a specific event or person. This focus is necessary for their work, but could be so much richer in context if they viewed the archivist as a collaborator instead of a glorified retriever.
I bring this up based on the collection of World War II materials we are currently processing at the Pepper Archives. These are mostly letters and reminiscences that veterans wrote in the late 1990s, and it goes without saying that each contribution is of great historical importance, and is quite a treasure trove.
But unless you deal with these documents the way we have, all together at once, you might miss a really sterling aspect of them that even we were surprised to discover: poetry.
Vast amounts of poetry.
The literary quality of this poetry is truly insignificant, and there are no heavyweight poets hiding in stacks. What is important is the understanding drawn from the volume of poetry we have found is that the WWII generation valued poetry, and actively participated in it. When they were moved by something, they wanted poems about it. They wrote them or found them, and treasured them.
Picking up one folder and finding a poem in it, tucked between photographs and memoirs, would not strike any researcher as significant. But it is significant, in a way that its mere presence does not indicate.
It would be as if the primary reaction of Americans to 9/11 would have been a huge outpouring of poetry. Not songs, not pictures, not memorial walls: poetry. I can’t even imagine the sublime difference in society, based on culture and educational standards that would inspire such a reaction.
No researcher who isn’t specifically looking at the topic of “poetry and the WWII generation” would think to remark on the incidental poems they might find in a folder they are looking through. However if any researcher were ever to ask me, the archivist for this collection, what stands out as unique or what might be significant but hidden, the first thing I would say is “poetry.”
But is anyone going to ask?
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