Research Guides: Poems and Poets: Finding Poets (Biography)

Finding Biographies

Biography in Context This link opens in a new window
Online biographical reference database in the fields of literature, science, business, entertainment, politics, sports, history, current events and the arts.Biographical information on over one million people throughout history, around the world.
Biography Reference Bank This link opens in a new window
Current Biography contains biographical information on approximately half a million people, from antiquity to the present. Dates of coverage: Ancient Times to present.
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new window
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry contains citations for poems that appear in anthologies and collections, as well as poet biographies, commentaries, a glossary of poetic terms, and full text for some poems. Users can search poems by title, first line, author gender, genre, and more.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Literature Resource Center offers biographical and other background information for research on literary topics, authors, and their works. Its coverage includes all genres and disciplines, all time periods, and all regions of the world. Literature Resource Center's content comes from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and more, including full text of selected poems, plays, and short stories.
Twayne's Author Series This link opens in a new window
Twayne’s Authors Series offers in-depth introductions to the lives and works of writers, the history and influence of literary movements, and the development of literary genres. The online version of Twayne's Authors Series includes content from six print series, including U.S. Authors, English Writers, and World Authors.

Using Subject Headings

Biographies are classified and sorted by author's name, dates of birth and death, and the term Biography. You can also limit you search in the NYU Libraries' catalog by using the genre facet on the left hand side of the results screen.

Here are some examples of subject headings:

Neruda, Pablo, 1904-1973 -- Biography
Wheatley, Phillis, 1753-1784
Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967 -- Biography
Milton, John, 1608-1674 -- Biography
Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911-1979
African American women poets -- Biography

Digital Collections

Allen Ginsberg Project
The website of the Allen Ginsberg Estate which offers access to the vast collection of Ginsberg material. Explore published and never-before-published text, photos, hand-written documents and audio and video materials representing Allen's life-work.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. This is supplemented by multimedia artifacts from the Imperial War Museum, a separate archive of over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources.
The Poetess Archive
This archive constitutes a resource for studying the literary history of popular British and American poetry. Much of it composed during what can be called the “bull market” of poetry's popularity, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular poetry was often written in what came to be designated an "effeminate" style, whether written by men or women. Writings in the poetess tradition were disseminated in myriad collections: miscellanies, beauties, literary annuals, gift books. They achieved a place of prominence in virtually every middle-class household. The Poetess Archive Database now contains a bibliography of over 4,000 entries for works by and about writers working in and against the “poetess tradition,” the extraordinarily popular, but much criticized, flowery poetry written in Britain and America between 1750 and 1900.
Romantic Circles (University of Maryland)
Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.
Walt Whitman Archive (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Includes digitized versions of all six editions of Leaves of Grass, plus a growing collection of Whitman's manuscripts.