Francesca Kaminski-Jones's Report

My PhD research examines the reception and re-writing of Homeric similes by modern authors, concentrating on Alice Oswald, Christopher Logue and Elizabeth Cook. I applied for the Royal Holloway travel awards in order to travel to Pennsylvania State University so that I could study the Christopher Logue archives housed in their Eberly Family Special Collections library. Securing a Santander grant was of great importance to my research, as a significant part of my work has been based around personal insights from the authors where possible via interview. Since Christopher Logue died in 2011, the only way for me to gain a similar understanding of how he perceived his work is to research his various archives, which contain primary material otherwise inaccessible to researchers. The visit to Pennsylvania State University enabled me to properly complete this archival research.

The Eberly Family Special Collections library is housed in the Pennsylvania State University's Paterno Library. It includes an Exhibition Hall displaying various rare books and manuscripts, via which one accesses the reference and reading rooms, providing a fascinating and often distracting route to work. The Logue archive itself contained a total of 20 boxes filled with documents and manuscripts, ranging from personal and work correspondence to drafts of many of Logue's writings to diaries and journals. Luckily the librarians were incredibly helpful both by email ahead of my trip and whilst I was there, and I was able to request in advance the items I wanted to look at, thus successfully cutting down my research to a mere 13 boxes. I chose to work through all Logue's correspondence that was housed in the archive, from 1949 to 1992, all the drafts of his Homeric writings, his research materials on Homer and literacy, and his notebooks on poetry, literature, and poetic theory and practice, amongst other miscellaneous material. The work was very dense and concentrated, requiring skimming sometimes illegible handwriting at great speed in order to get it all done in time. I chose to make scanned copies of almost all the poetry drafts that were relevant to me in order to be able to peruse them properly at a later point. The material proved invaluable to providing a deeper understanding of Logue's poetic practice, and gave me various excellent insights into his way of reading Homer, his understanding of the process of creating a modern version of the Iliad, and even his views on the similes in particular.

The main outcome of this research trip will of course be shown in my thesis, where I will be able to incorporate useful quotations from Logue's notes and correspondence, and the results of examining the changes that Logue made to his poems from draft to draft. One great fount of information from the archives was the correspondence between Logue and Donald Carne-Ross, who instigated the work on the accounts of the Iliad and provided Logue (who did not read Ancient Greek) with cribs for the Homeric text. Many exciting findings emerged that have not been made use of in previous scholarship on Logue's Homer, and in fact his archives seem in general to be a painfully underused resource, which made this trip of great worth to my work.