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Poetry Resources: Find Poems

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Find Poems Online--Start Here

All of the websites linked to below are good places to find individual poems. Some also provide commentary and biographical information about poets and their work. Be aware that, while some of these secondary sources may be reliable, others may not be. Any commentary you find on these sites must be evaluated before you trust and use it. Learn how to evaluate what you find on the Internet.

TIP: Actually, the easiest and quickest way to find a poem online is just to do a search on Google for the title of the poem. Putting the title in quotation marks is a good idea. But be aware that the version of a poem that you find on any site may not be the best text of the poem. To find those use QuickSearch, the online catalog, to find scholarly editions of a poet's work. Usually such collected works are published by academic publishers.

Poetry Databases

These are great resources for finding individual poems, or poetry by specific poets.

To use these databases off-campus, you will need to enter you Multipass username and password when you click on a link.

TIPS:

Once in one of these, if you are looking for a specific poem, just enter the title.

If you want all poems by a poet  in one of the databases, enter the poet's first and last names.

Granger's Index to Poetry

The traditional tool for finding poems in anthologies is the Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies, now known as Columbia Granger's. This printed source has gone through numerous editions, many of which are owned by the Gumberg Library. The easiest way to find individual poems is to use the tools in the other boxes on this screen. But, if these do not produce the results you require, Columbia Granger's is the good, though old-school, fallback. Not every volume contains listings for the same poems, so different editions may need to be consulted in order to locate the poem in an anthology. Columbia Granger's does not give the text of poems.

Once you find a poem listed in Columbia Granger's, you would then need to do a title search in QuickSearch to determine if Gumberg Library owns the anthology in which it appears.