Research Guides: ENGL 070: Poetry Project: Research and Development (SC): Finding Poems

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry
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Offers 250,000 full text poems and 450,000 citations, as well as poetry commentary, poets' biographies, and literary glossary terms. Also provides citations and finding tools for thousands of other poems in hundreds of printed anthologies. Poems are searchable by first line, last line, title, author, and subject. Also provides biographical information on poets and a glossary of terms. Coverage varies.

Digital Collections

Literature Online (LION)
This database includes extensive full-text collections of English, American, African-American, and Canadian poetry. You can search by author, or select "texts" and search within poetry by title, first line, last line, or keyword. You may also search or browse the "Individual Collections," which include, among others, the Faber Poetry Library, a collection of influential Twentieth Century poetry. This database is also useful for finding information about poets.
Canadian Poetry
This unique collection contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets including Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott, offering a comprehensive survey of Canadian poetry from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth.
English Poetry, Second Edition
English Poetry, Second Edition redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with enhanced functionality and the addition of more than 20,000 poems. The most comprehensive archive of English verse available now offers incomparable representation both of the literary heritages of former colonial countries and of the poetic legacies of English writers who have only been brought back to scholarly attention during the l
Faber Poetry Library
A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of Thom Gunn, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove
Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This unparalleled collection includes 50,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song.
Twentieth-Century English Poetry
A collection of more than 600 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Thom Gunn, Fleur Adcock, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.

Online Resources

The is just a sampling of some of the valuable resources available to you via the internet. Some of these sites may have digitized images of the original texts along with extensive bibliographies. But, when searching the internet for research purposes, be sure to pay close attention to sites with .org or .edu web addresses. If you find a valuable site not listed below, please let me know so that I can add it to the list.

For Better for Verse (University of Virginia)
For Better for Verse is an interactive learning tool that can help you understand what makes metered poetry in English tick.
Representative Poetry Online (University of Toronto)
Representative Poetry Online, includes 4,079 English poems by 618 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today.
American Verse Project (University of Michigan)
The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.
British Women Romantic Poets, 1789 - 1832 (UC Davis)
The British Women Romantic Poet's Project is producing an online scholarly archive consisting of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period.
Victorian Women Writers Project (Indiana University)
The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
PennSound
A project from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, PennSound provides sound files of contemporary poets reading their work. Search or browse for individual poems, or listen to entire poetry readings. You can listen to the MP3 files online or download them to listen to on your MP3 player.
UBU WEB
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.