Carl Rakosi (1903-2005) was a social worker, psychotherapist and poet, best known for his affiliation with the "Objectivists," a group of poets assembled by Louis Zukofsky in the early 1930s and championed by Ezra Pound. Other "Objectivists" included William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, and the Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker. In the late-1930s, after the collapse of several collaborative "Objectivist" publishing ventures, Rakosi stopped writing and publishing poetry and devoted his energy toward establishing himself as a social worker and psychotherapist. His only volume of poetry from this period, Selected Poems, was published by James Laughlin's New Directions in 1941.

In 1925, Rakosi legally changed his name to Callman Rawley for professional reasons. Over the course of a long and successful career as a social work administrator and psychotherapist, he published several articles and reviews on social work and psychology as Rawley.

In 1965, prompted by an unexpected letter from Andrew Crozier, a young English poet, Rawley resumed writing and publishing poetry as Carl Rakosi. Between 1967 and 1999, Rakosi published eight individual volumes of poetry. Collections of his prose (1983) and poetry (1985) were published by the National Poetry Foundation, and a collection of his early writing (edited by Andrew Crozier) was published in 1995.

This collection contains literary and personal correspondence, working papers, lecture notes, poems, book reviews, interviews with Rakosi, and will eventually contain several audio recordings, mainly recordings of poetry readings and lectures on poetry delivered by Rakosi during the 1970s and 80s. With a few exceptions (namely, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bruce Fearing, George and Linda Oppen, Martin Rosenblum, and Bob Ryley), only Rakosi's side of the correspondence is included in the digitized portion of the collection; the vast majority of Rakosi's letters here were written during the 1980s. The physical materials presented here are all part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Special Collections. Other significant collections of Rakosi material are held by UCSD's Archive for New Poetry, by the Harry Ransom Center (correspondence with Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Charles Tomlinson, and William Carlos Williams), and by Harvard's Houghton Library (in the New Directions Publishing Corporation collection).