The Poetry Foundation, established in 2003, was created through a fund provided by Ruth Lilly. Since its creation, the Foundation has grown by leaps and bounds, and one of their best public outreach efforts is this website. With a well-thought out visual design, their homepage is a great starting point for learning more about the world of poetry. Sections on the homepage include “Publishing”,...

Created and maintained by Professor Ian Lancashire, Representative Poetry Online is both a nod back to poetry's past in terms of its content, and a look to the future (and present) as it exists online here at this site. The approximately 3100 hundred or so poems offered here are culled from the volume, "Representative Poetry", which was first published in 1912. In fact, this is the third version...

Based at the University of Cincinnati, the Ellison Projects holds over 700 recorded readings and lectures given under the auspices of the University of Cincinnati’s Department of English and Comparative Literature and the University Libraries since 1951. Since that time, the writers Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, Derek Walcott and many others have graced the school with their words and musings....

Tracy K. Smith, graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities and Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, teaches creative writing at Princeton University. Born in 1972, she was already considered a major American poet before she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her book of poems, Life on Mars, which the New York Times described as "gorgeous and ecstatic" with an "extraordinary range and...

Best known for his fine use of meter and eccentric personality, Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of the best-known poets of Victorian-era England. Edited by John Walsh of Indiana University, the Swinburne Project currently contains four volumes of Swinburne's poems, two volumes of his prose from the Bonchurch Edition of _The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne_, and his second classical...

Walt Whitman - poet, essayist, journalist, and lover of spring - created a true Victorian scandal when he self-published Leaves of Grass, with its wildly free verse and its sometimes erotic sentiments. While the public swooned and scorned, Whitman dutifully revised the collection over the next three decades, only stopping when a stroke made it impossible for him to work. This site from the...

The American Verse Project, a part of the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. Full texts are being made available in both HTML and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Authors include William Cullen Bryant, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and...