Research Guides: Poetry: Primary sources

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There are many ways to find a poets work. This guide provides some examples.

Known poet:

If you are searching for collections of the works of a specific poet you can search the library's catalog for that poet as an author. For example:

Remember that you can always broaden your search by using the Search OhioLINK button at the top of the page.

Known poem:

If you know the poem, but not the poet, there are several ways to find the text of the poem. For example:

American Verse Project
The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.
British Women Romantic Poets, 1789 - 1832
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 between 1789 and 1832, a period traditionally known in English literature as the Romantic period
English Poetry 1579-1830
The 25,000 records in this largely full-text database follow developments in English poetry from the publication of the Shepheardes Calender in 1579 down to Spenser's successors among the nineteenth-century romantics.

English Poetry, 600-1900
Contains the full text of over 175,000 poems by over 1,400 poets from British Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries, between the years 600 and 1900. This database contains the full text of over 4400 poetry collections listed in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Many of these collections are rare books, unavailable in print form.

Twentieth Century African American Poetry
Contains 12,000 poems by more than 100 African-American poets, including Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, and emerging poets. Biographical profiles accompany each poets work
Twentieth Century American Poetry
The database includes 52,000 works of most major twentieth-century American poets, beginning with the traditionalists; continuing through the modernists, represented by such poets as Wallace Stevens; and moving on to the contemporary works of the 1990s. The broad coverage of Twentieth-Century American Poetry includes collected works and individual volumes of poetry from all the major movements and schools, including the New School, the Chicago School, the Southern School, the Confessionals, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets
Twentieth Century English Poetry
Substantial online resource for English poetry.