Poems How-To Guide
Overview
If you want a book of poems by a specific poet look under his or her name as an author search in WestCat. If you want to find references to specific poems by author, title, first line, or subject, begin with these resources.
How to Locate Poems
Poem Finder (LitFinder) More than 125,000 full-text poems and over 850,000 poems indexed. Search by any word(s) in a poem title, first line, last line, book title, author, or subject. International in scope (in English translation) and covers antiquity to the present.
Academy of American Poets
A multi-media resource providing information on over 400 American poets, including biographical and bibliographical information, the full-text of selected poems, audio clips, and related web sites.
Chadwyck-Healy Literature Collections Full text of English and American poetry, drama, and fiction from different time periods. The Literature Online database organized by collections.
Columbia Granger's Dictionary of Poetry Quotations
PN 6082 .C57 1992 (Ref - Desk Coll.)
Use the keyword index if you are trying to identify a specific poem, or the subject index if you're looking for a poem on a subject. The body of this book contains the most frequently quoted selections from famous poems. You will need to use a source like Poem Finder (Lit Finder) or the Electronic Poetry Center if you want to get a copy of the whole poem.
Electronic Poetry Center
Provides easy access not only to poetry "published" electronically but to more conventional printed poetry and poet web pages.
Granger's Index to Poetry
PN 1022 .H39 (Ref - Most recent in Desk Coll.)
This source indexes anthologies or collections of poetry. You can look up a poem by its title, first line, last line, author, or subject. Once you've found the title of a collection containing your poem, check WestCat to see if we own that book. The first edition of Granger's was published in 1904. Later editions often do not index poems that have already been listed in previous editions.
Index of American Periodical Verse PN 1021 .I5x (Ref) 1971-present. An annual title and author index to poems published in periodicals in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. If you find a poem you're looking for in this index you need to search WestCat, the Libraries' catalog, to see if we own the periodical in which that poem is printed.
Literature Online (LION) A searchable full-text database of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, literary criticism from over 200 literature journals and various reference resources. Includes biographies, bibliographies, and links to Web sites.
Poetry Index Annual
PN 1022.P63 (Ref)
This index systematically indexes all poetry anthologies as they are published. Thus these volumes cover anthologies Columbia Granger's Index misses, since that series is selective. Each annual edition of Poetry Index Annual complements and supplements the preceding editions. Poems are separately indexed by author, title, and subject. An alphabetical symbol stands for the name of the anthology in which the poems appear. 1982-1993.
Literary Criticism
MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association) Z 7006 .M64 (Ref. Index Shelves) (1921-present)
Indexes periodicals and series, monographs, book collections, dissertation abstracts, Festschriften (books written to honor a particular scholar), and other sources. Areas covered include modern languages and literature, folklore, linguistics, literary themes, genres, and related topics across national literatures and other classified boundaries. Covers from 1963 to the present. Updated 9 times per year.
Poetry Criticism
PN 1010 .P499 (Ref)
Multi-volume series with excerpts from criticisms of the most significant and widely studied poets of world literature.
Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretations Since 1925 of British and American Poems
Z 2014 .P7 K8 (Ref)
A handy volume selectively listing interpretations of some of the best known poems. The sources listed under article indexes in this guide will also be useful in locating explications of poetry.
Ask A Librarian
Maria A. Perez-Stable, E-mail: maria.perez-stable@wmich.edu
Phone: 269-387-5322
Last updated: August 2008