Research Guides: Poems and Poets: Finding Poems

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry contains 250,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations, numbers that will continually expand with each update. The poems in full text are the most widely-read in the English language, as well as in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Included also is poetry in Portuguese, Polish, Yiddish, Welsh, Gaelic, and other Celtic languages, as well as poems in the ancient languages: Anglo-Saxon, Provencal and Latin. Scholars in each of these languages have reviewed and guided the selection of poems, so that the poetry on Granger’s is also the poetry encountered in the classroom.

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry offers complete coverage of the works of several individual great poets, including the complete poems of Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and other major poets. In addition, users will find a wealth of current poetry from some of the best poetry periodicals, such as Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new window

Searching the catalog

You can search the NYU Libraries' catalog by title, author, or subject to find books of poetry in the library. Use the limiters in the third drop-down menu from the main search screen to make your selections. Here are some examples:

Title:

What are Years
Meditations in an Emergency
Paradise Lost

Author:

Millay, Edna St. Vincent
Bishop, Elizabeth
Keats, John

Subject:

Lyric Poetry
Poets, American
Poetry, Modern
Poets, Chinese - Biography

Digital Collections of Poetry (NYU access)

African American Poetry This link opens in a new window
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring thousands of poems by some of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
Alexander Street Literature This link opens in a new window
Alexander Street Literature is a cross-searchable package of full-text literature collections, focused on place, race, and gender. The collections include poetry, short fiction, novels, full-text plays, and film scripts.
Emily Dickinson Archive This link opens in a new window
The Emily Dickinson Archive provides high-resolution images of manuscripts of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from selected historical and scholarly editions.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period includes searchable full text and page images for volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842. The collection also offers numerous biographical and critical essays prepared by leading scholars
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature is a searchable collection of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino writers working in the United States, including previously unpublished titles. The database also includes a collection of ephemera (playbills, brochures, photographs, postcards, etc.) and artwork.
Literary Manuscripts Leeds This link opens in a new window
Literary Manuscripts Leeds contains complete facsimile images of manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with a database of first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and color images demonstrating 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
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)
Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape This link opens in a new window
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape provides access to digitized images of manuscripts, artworks, and correspondence from the Wordsworth Trust, focusing on William Wordsworth and his circle. This collection also includes the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth and manuscripts from Romantic writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period This link opens in a new window
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period contains searchable full text of Romantic-era poetry composed by Scottish women, as well as contemporary critical reviews and numerous scholarly essays on the poets and their work.

Other Online Resources for Poetry

The following sites are available through the open web. 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.

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.
The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (University of Virginia)
The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain.
The Edmund Spenser Homepage (Cambridge University)
The Edmund Spenser Home Page is the home of Edmund Spenser studies on the Internet. This set of pages is devoted to supporting the reading, study, and dicussion of the words of Edmund Spenser. It aims to serve the needs of the scholar, of the student, and of the interested passer-by, offering resources and links of various level of specialization
Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a peer-reviewed digital archive and research project devoted to the poetry of the long eighteenth century. It includes searchable full text of over 3,000 poems, building on the electronic texts created by the Text Creation Partnership from Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Favorite Poem Project
The Favorite Poem Project is dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives. Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems. This site archives videos of participants in the project reciting the poems they chose.
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.
Free Verse
An online journal that publishes contemporary poetry, interviews with poets, and book reviews. Hosted by North Carolina State University.
Milton - L (University of Richmond)
Devoted to the life, literature and times of John Milton. Contains electronic versions of Milton's work and other reference material.
Modern American Poetry (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
A "scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry," which includes: biographies, critical essays, and images relating to poetry.
Modern English Collection (University of Virginia)
This heterogeneous collection contains fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present, arranged for browsing by author's last name or by category of interest.
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.
The Poetry Archive
The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.
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.
Rossetti Archive
The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.
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.
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.
The William Blake Archive
The Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees.

The Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

This is a great resource for locating poems, researching poets, and exploring the numerous features including podcasts and videos of poets and their poetry.

The Poetry Foundation

Poets.org

Launched in 1996, Poets.org is the award-winning website of the Academy of American Poets. Visitors to Poets.org will find thousands of poems as well as hundreds of poet biographies and essays and interviews about poetry. Also available are poetry lesson plans for teachers. Poets.org receives a million visitors each month, making it the most popular site about poetry on the web.

Poets.org

Poems and Poets

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