POEM LOCATOR

A Faulk Central Library Research Guide

How do I find a certain poem on the Internet?

• Via the Library's Web page, two databases are good ones for full-text poetry:
  • LitFINDER contains more than 125,000 poems in full text, and indexes many more, often with excerpts. A subject index is included.
  • 20th Century American and English Poetry contains more than 50,000 poems by over 580 poets. Access these databases from home with your library card number, or from computers in the Library.
• Poets.org allows searching by poem name and by poet. Includes more than 1700 poems, and audio clips of a few, read by the author or another poet.
• Links to pages devoted to one poet
• A lot of poetry is available freely via the Internet, and can be located using a search engine like Google You may search for a poem by title, by words that appear in the poem, by author, or by various combinations of these. For example, to find 'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy, your search terms could be:
  darkling thrush hardy, or
  thomas hardy thrush, or, if you only remembered a phrase from the poem,
  "blast-beruffled plume"
  Often putting exact phrases within quotation marks can make your search results better.

Some poems can be difficult to locate on the web, especially contemporary ones that are still under stricter copyright controls. If you're looking for a specific, fairly recent poem, you may have more success tracking it down using the library's print resources.

The following sites will have at least a representative sample of the works of poets, generally up until the late 19th to early 20th centuries:

• Index to Project Bartleby Verse
  This site is the entry point to poetry at one of the first Internet sites devoted to literature in full text. Search for poetry and to list authors and book titles.
• An Index of Poets in Representative Poetry Online
  This page from the University of Toronto contains links allowing searches by title, date, and keyword as well. Is geared mainly toward British poetry, but contains other nationalities, too.

How do I find a certain poem using print sources?

If you know who wrote the poem, look in the author portion of the computer catalog to see if there are any of this person's books of poetry in the library. Or, if the poem is fairly well-known, you may be able to quickly locate it in one of several anthologies of popular poems on the library's 2nd floor reference shelves. Some of these anthologies are:

If you don't know the author of the poem, or if the library doesn't own a book by the poet that contains the poem you need, there are indexes to help you locate the poem in anthologies elsewhere in the library. The most commonly used print index is:

Using it, you can look up a poem by title, author, first line, or last line. Entries list an abbreviation for the title of an anthology. These abbreviations are matched to the title of the anthology at the front of the index volume, along with a note indicating if our library owns the book.

Other useful indexes include:

If the poem is indexed, but the Austin Public Library system doesn't own the book that includes the poem, we can try to borrow a copy of the book through Interlibrary Loan. Books ordered through this process often arrive within two weeks.

If you need help interpreting a poem, see Literary Criticism: A Faulk Central Library Research Guide. For further assistance, ask a librarian.

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