Poets' private lives exposed

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The private lives of some of the most distinguished poets of the 20th century will be revealed in the Library during this month's Brighton Festival.

Unpublished personal letters and manuscripts of Rudyard Kipling (pictured below), W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others will be displayed from 1 to 31 May in an exhibition entitled Poets' Papers.

The original documents, which form part of the rich archive of manuscripts in the Library, include a frank exchange between Kipling and women's rights campaigner, Marie Stopes. She wanted him to change the last line of his celebrated poem "If" from "And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!" to "And you will lead the race o'er ground you've won". He refused.

Another literary revelation is Ezra Pound's letter to Christian socialist Maurice Reckitt in which he expresses his contempt over the abdication crisis of Edward VIII.

The exhibition has been put together by University Librarian Adrian Peasgood and Manuscripts Librarian Elizabeth Inglis.

She said: "The documents we have in our archive give a valuable insight into the lives of the poets and we thought this would be an excellent opportunity to reveal them."

Among the exhibits will be items from the personal archive of Charles Madge, a poet, sociologist and co-founder of social-research organisation Mass-Observation, which is now housed on campus.

It was Madge who first came up with the idea of collecting people's writings to create a record of life in the 20th century. In 1937, together with anthropologist Tom Harrisson and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, he began interviewing people in Bolton to gather their impressions of the world around them. The team produced two books, Britain by Mass Observation (1939) and War Begins at Home (1940).

In 1999 Madge's daughter donated his personal papers to the Mass-Observation Archive and a conference to celebrate his life and work takes place at the University on 12 May.

Archivist Dorothy Sheridan said: "Madge's work was important because he was the first person to think that the thoughts of ordinary people were worth recording. He believed everyone could write."

Next week's conference, which has been organised jointly by the Centre for Life History and the Centre for Modernist Studies, will include sessions on surrealism and the culture of everyday life and film, photography and documentary culture. The keynote speaker will be Professor Stuart Hall and speakers from Sussex include Dr Andrew Crozier, Dr Laura Marcus, Dr David Mellor and Dorothy Sheridan.

She said: "The conference is a timely opportunity to reconsider the foundations of Mass-Observation and to situate the work of Charles Madge and his contemporaries in their broader social, cultural and historical contexts."