American Poetry

With more than 40,000 works from over 200 poets, American Poetry is a matchless resource for educators, students, and researchers of American literature.

American Poetry offers a definitive collection of both women and men poets from the beginning of the country to the opening of the twentieth century.  The collection begins with early Colonial poems such as John Wilson's 'A Song of Thanksgiving for the Lasting Remembrance of God's Wonderful Works' (1603), William Morrell's 'New England' (1625) and the complete works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, and continues through to early twentieth-century writers such as Adelaide Crapsey and Vachel Lindsay. For the first time, major canonical poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and important literary groups, such as the Transcendentalists and the Knickerbocker school, can be read alongside substantial bodies of work by less familiar names such as Elizabeth Akers Allen, Richard Emmons, Lemuel Hopkins and Emma Lazarus.

An eminent editorial advisory board selected the authors and editions for inclusion in American Poetry. It used as its principal bibliographic source, the Bibliography of American Literature, Yale University Press, 1955-1991, and supplemented this with additional poets to provide a more thorough and rounded collection. The complete text of each poem is included. Any accompanying text written by the original author and forming an integral part of the work, such as notes, dedications, and prefaces to individual poems, is also generally included.

An intuitive interface presents the user with easy access to the corpus, and enables sophisticated searches to be carried out quickly and easily.