Guides: Poetry: Overview

Poetry E-Resources by Genre

Illustration from The year's at the spring; an anthology of recent poetry (1920); Image courtesy The Internet Archive.

These databases, arranged by chronology and/or genre, are useful for exploring poetry in historical and cultural context.

African American Poetry
Nearly 3,000 full-text poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

20th Century African American Poetry
A database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Features 10,000 poems by around 70 of the most important African-American poets of the last century.
American Poetry, 1600-1900
Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.
20th Century American Poetry
This collection of full-text poems includes 52,000 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.
Black Women Writers
Searchable fulltext for writings by women from Africa and the African diaspora worldwide. Includes more than 460 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry texts in more than 100,000 pages in English, French, French Creole, Portuguese, and Luganda. Slightly more than half of titles are American, with Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, and Senegal well-represented among the two dozen countries covered.
English Poetry (600-1900), second edition
The bibliographic source is the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1969-72).
20th Century English Poetry
A collection of 594 volumes of poetry by 282 poets from 1900-2000, including W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library.

First World War Poetry Digital Archive
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video. The collections include primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas supplemented by multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources.
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Unrestricted Access - Pennkey not necessary
Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS)
A companion site to the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, MAPS provides criticism, biographies, and images for over 160 poets, all of whom are featured in the 2000 edition of the anthology, held at Van Pelt.
Persian Poetry
Searchable library of 35 of the best-known Persian poets; sponsored by Bamdad.org.
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Unrestricted Access
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: 19th Century

Scholarly Databases

These databases will help you find scholarly articles about your topic

Articles+
Articles+ searches through many of our Penn-subscribed journals, and brings you results all in one place.

Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.
JSTOR
JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database.

Penn's subscription currently includes all the available collections:
- the Arts & Sciences Collection I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and the Complement
- the Business II & III Collection
- the Biological Sciences Collection
- the Health & General Science Collection
- the Language and Literature Collection
- the Music Collection
- the 19th Century British Pamphlets
Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students.

Printing from the JSTOR database requires downloading a helper application called JPrint.
EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
MLA International Bibliography

ABELL
Bibliographic citations with indexing for all aspects of English literature, literary culture, and linguistics. Topics covered include: English prose, poetry, fiction, films, biography, travel writing, literary theory, and studies of individual authors; language, syntax, phonology, lexicology, semantics, stylistics, and dialectology; bibliography, manuscript studies, textual studies, history of publishing; traditional culture of the English-speaking world, customs, beliefs, narratives, song, dance, and material culture.
Search for databases by subject

Poetry Dictionaries & Encyclopedias Online

Glosseries of poetry terminology -- such as meter, stanza, or spondee -- as well as poetry forms, such as the ballad or villanelle.

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, 4th edition (2012) via JSTOR
This is the JSTOR version, which displays each page of the print encyclopedia as a searchable PDF. Good for browsing or when you aren't sure what you are looking for!
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (1993) via Literature Online
The ProQuest version of the Princeton Encyclopedia allows you to search for and select specific entries to view.
Literary Dictionaries & Reference E-Resources
Displays all Literary E-Resources in our catalog.

Poetry Out Loud

The Kelly Writers House
The Writers House, located on the Penn Campus, hosts frequent readings, lectures, and over 150 other writing-related events.
PennSound
PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives. PennSound features podcasts, poets reading their work, and news on poetry events in Philadelphia.
PennSound Radio
Listen to live daily programs on your phone or computer.

Special Collections in Poetry & Literature

The Penn Libraries feature many poetry-related resources and special collections -- not all of which are available online.

Kelly Writers House Archives
Held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts department at the Van Pelt Library.
Charles Bernstein Collection of Poetry Chapbooks
Charles Bernstein Collection of Poetry Monographs

Poetry Resources at the Library

The Norton Anthology of Poetry by Margaret Ferguson; Mary Jo Salter (Editor); Jon Stallworthy (Editor)
The Fifth Edition retains the flexibility and breadth of selection that has defined this classic anthology, while improved and expanded editorial apparatus make it an even more useful teaching tool.
Anthology of Modern American Poetry by Cary Nelson (Editor); Emory Elliott (Editor); Linda K. Kerber (Editor); A. Walton Litz (Editor); Terence Martin (Editor)
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry by Jeffrey H. Gray (Editor); James McCorkle (Editor); Mary McAleer Balkun (Editor)
The most comprehensive reference on American poetry ever assembled, this encyclopedia includes more than 900 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed by approximately 350 scholars. Written for students and general readers, the set covers poetry from the colonial era to the present, devoting special attention to contemporary poets and their works.
Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights by Emmanuel S. Nelson (Editor)
Alphabetically arranged entries present 62 contemporary gay American poets and dramatists. While the majority of included writers are younger artists who came of age in the post-Stonewall U.S., some are older authors whose work has continued or persisted into recent decades. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the author's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies.
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: 19th Century by Eric L. Haralson (Editor)
With contributions from over 100 scholars, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century provides essays on the careers, works, and backgrounds of more than 100 nineteenth-century poets. It also provides entries on specialized categories of twentieth-century verse such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs, and Native American poetry.
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: 20th Century by Eric L. Haralson (Editor)
The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century.

General Poetry Resources

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry
Contains 250,000 full text poems and 450,000 citations, as well as poetry commentary, poets' biographies, literary glossary terms, and audio recordings. Use the "Advanced Search" feature to refine by Schools & Movements, Language, Forms, Nationality, and other criteria.
Faber Poetry Library
A searchable, full-text 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 James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets.
Literature Online (LION)
LION is a searchable, full-text collection of over 250,000 works in English and American Literature. Separate databases are English Poetry (1100-1900), American Poetry (1600-1900), African-American Poetry (1750-1900), English Drama (1280-1915), Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780), Early English Prose Fiction (1500-1700), The Bible In English (990-1970), Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare (1591-1911), Modern Poetry (1972-1997).

The Poetry Foundation
Features essays, poems, biographical details, and other resources. Includes the ability to search for poems by theme.

Resources for Writers

Looking to publish or poems, or learn more about how to do so? Perhaps interested in applying to an MFA, or writing competition? These resources can help.

Directory of Poetry Publishers
Duotrope Submission Manager
A database of publishers of poetry, fiction, and other genres. Includes deadlines, rates of acceptance, and a system for managing submissions. Widely used by poets trying to get published -- a great resource. Has both free and premium (subscription-only) features.
Poets & Writers "Tools for Writers"
Information on MFA programs, writing contests, awards, residencies, and other resources for writers.