Poetry: The Search for Sources

This guide will help you get started studying poetry, books, databases where you can find journal articles, and websites.

Do you already have a specific poet or poem in mind?

• If you do, try searching JETfind for related books, either by entering the poem's title, or the author's name. 
• If you're searching for criticism and commentary about the author's work, try entering the author's name and the word criticism ("Langston Hughes" AND criticism).
• You might also search for a movement or style, such as "Beat poetry" or "Victorian poetry"

Sample searches below will open in JETfind.

If you haven't picked a poet or poem yet, the below databases are great places to start.

Some suggestions for poets to study, and examples of their work:

19^th Century:

• Lord Alfred Tennyson and "The Lady of Shalott"
• William Butler Yeats and "Easter, 1916"
• Walt Whitman and "Song of Myself"
• Emily Dickinson and "My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close"
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and "Song of Hiawatha"
• Robert Burns and "A Red, Red Rose"
• George Eliot and "The Spanish Gypsy"
• Lewis Carroll and "Jabberwocky"
• Edgar Allan Poe and "The Raven"
• John Greenleaf Whittier and "Snow-Bound"

20^th Century

• Robert Frost and "The Road Not Taken"
• e. e. cummings and "Old age sticks"
• Maya Angelou  and "On the Pulse of Morning"
• Bob Dylan and "Desolation Row"
• Allen Ginsberg and "Howl"
• Langston Hughes and "The Weary Blues"
• Sylvia Plath and "Mirror"               
• Dorothy Parker and "The Last Question"
• Shel Silverstein and "A Light in the Attic"
• Pablo Neruda and "The Heights of Macchu Picchu"

21st Century

• Seamus Heaney and "Death of Naturalist"
• Fleur Adcock and "Four Heidi with Blue Hair"
• Wendell Berry and "The Apple Tree"
• Joyce Carol Oates and "Burning Oak, November"
• Margaret Atwood and "Siren Song"
• Vikram Seth and "The Tale of Melon City"
• Fatimah Ashghar and "If They Come for Us"
• Aude Lorde and "Coal"