by Tenebris

Created on: March 31, 2010

Searching for the text of a poem used to be a matter of paging through anthologies in dusty libraries. The Internet has changed all that. It is now easy to find the on-lin text of most popular poems in a matter of seconds, with even the most obscure poems taking little longer.

The first stop for all poetry lovers should be Project Gutenberg. At the Project Gutenberg

Consortia Center Poets’ Collection, hundreds of poets are sorted by intervals of fifty years, going back as far as Geoffrey Chaucer. The preferred web format is plain text, so that the poem can be accessible to the greatest number of readers. Project Gutenberg prides itself on its proofreaders, so what you find here should be high enough quality to use on advanced essays. However, where a poem exists in an original archaic version and a modern version, Project Gutenberg prefers the older version. This can be an issue with reading such older poetry as Shakespearean sonnets. Most PG works are in the public domain, although a few are distributed with special copyright clearances.

A multitude of other websites have large collections of poetry, although few are as exhaustive as Project Gutenberg. Most of these focus on the most popular poems. Poem Hunter and the Poetry Connection are free to browse. Some sites, such as Bibliophil.org, require registration. Most sites also include links to other poetry collections and poetry analysis. OldPoetry.com has forums for discussion.

The works of major poets can also be found in dedicated on-line websites. Websites dedicated to virtually every major poet can be found by a simple Google search. One of the best known is the MIT website, which carries the complete works of William Shakespeare. I mention also the Yeats Society Sligo website, not because it has an exhaustive collection of poetry (it doesn’t), but because it includes audio recordings of Yeats poetry, read by Yeats himself.

If you have nothing of a poem but a single phrase or line, try typing it into Google. You will be surprised at how often a short quote pulls up the full text of the source. If you keep running into collections of quotations, try adding extra search phrases: the poet’s name (as soon as you find it), the year of publication, or even the word ‘poem’ or 'poetry'.

The one place where the Internet sometimes fails is with modern poetry. Poetry of the 1800s and before is almost entirely in the public domain, the one exception being modern translations. Poetry more recent than the 1950s is likely to be still under copyright. It is entirely possible to find its text on-line regardless, but it really should not be there.

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