Building Cornell University Library’s Collections
The Cornell Wordsworth Collection
Cornell’s famed Wordsworth Collection includes the earliest known portrait of the poet, painted by William Shuter in 1798 when Wordsworth was only 28 years old.
Cornell University Library’s William Wordsworth Collection is an internationally prominent collection, second in size only to that of Dove Cottage in England. The Cornell Wordsworth Collection offers nearly comprehensive book holdings on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and related authors, along with letters, manuscripts, broadsides, pictures, documents, and objects by, to, belonging to, or about Wordsworth and his family.
The Cornell Wordsworth Collection had its beginning in the St. John Wordsworth Collection, which was acquired in 1925 and represents forty years of devoted collecting by Mrs. Cynthia Morgan St. John of Ithaca, New York. Originally purchased with funds provided by former Cornell University Trustee Victor Emanuel ’19, the collection today is supported by the M. H. Abrams and Ruth Abrams endowment.
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