Modern Poetry

If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations of items to add to this guide, please email  Don Juedes, Librarian for English and American Literature.

For a more comprehensive list of electronic indexing and abstracting services for English and American literature, consult the English and American Literature online resources by subject  webpage.

Humanities International Index  (All US JHU)

Contains bibliographic references to literary, scholarly and creative journals published in the United States and Canada. Covers over 700 journals published from 1975 to the present, many of which cannot be found in other reference works (so-called "little" magazines). Provides information for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including, poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations.

Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature  (All US JHU)

Vol. 4 (1923)- London : Modern Humanities Research Association, 1924- International, classified bibliogrphy for literatures in English. Includes books, portions of books, articles, dissertations, and book reviews.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index via Web of Science  (All US JHU)

Philadelphia, 1976 to date. 3/yr. with annual cumulation. In 3 parts: I, an author list of recent articles and book reviews; II, Permuterm Index to names and other words appearing in the titles of the articles cited in Part I; III, a Citation Index listing of all works cited in the footnotes and bibliographies of the articles and reviews in Part I (the "Source Index"). The Citation Index notes references to novels, poems, plays, paintings, films, operas, musical compositions, etc., as well as to scholarly books and articles. Available in print at Z5937.A85 Reading Room, Floor 1; or search the Web of Science, which includes the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science Citation Index. Coverage begins with 1975.

MLA International Bibliography  (All JHU (incl. International))

This is the most thorough single listing of research on literature, languages, linguistics and folklore, covering articles in some 4,000 journals and in certain books. It does not list book reviews, or chapters in books. It is available in print. Updated ten times per year.

Readers' Guide To Periodical Literature Retrospective  (All US JHU)

The Readers' Guide Retrospective provides indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and includes some peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. Covers the Arts and Humanities and includes titles such as Poetry Magazine, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, the Edinburgh Review, and countless other, as well as scholarly journals such as Modern Philology and PMLA , in addition to popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Permitts insight into the cultural history of 20th century America. Overall coverage: 1890-1982; individual titles vary; contains some full text.

Bateson, F. W. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. New York & Cambridge, 1941-1957. 5 vols. Covers in great detail the Old English, Middle English, modern English, and Latin literature of the British Isles and includes a brief treatment of the English literature of the Dominions and India. It does not include American literature and gives only incidental inclusion of Welsh, Gaelic, or Celtic material.

Blanck, Jacob. Bibliography of American Literature. (BAL) New Haven, 1955-91. 9 vols. Major descriptive bibliography of the works of 281 American authors from the Federal period through 1930. Description is for separate publications (including books, broadsides, anthologies, pamphlets, and ephemera), with emphasis on first editions and "the first appearance of any prose or poetry." Arranged by author, then chronologically.

Winship, Michael, et al. Bibliography of American Literature: A Selective Index. Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1995. Compiled to provide increased access to BAL and offer essential access by author, title, date, and publisher.

Howard-Hill, T.H. Index to British Literary Bibliography. Oxford, 1969- 7 vols. to date. An ongoing project that represents the most complete bibliography of British literary bibliography.

New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 4 vols. and index vol. Cambridge, 1969-1977. Indispensable bibliography of primary and secondary sources; often the best place to begin research. Covers the literatures of the British Isles from 600 to 1950. Its predecessor (above) remains useful, especially for social and political backgrounds, as well as for Commonwealth literatures.

Alexander, Harriet Semmes. American and British Poetry: A Guide to the Criticism, 1925-1978. Athens, OH, 1984. Lists criticism, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, of English-language poetry. Complements Guide to American Poetry Explanation (below). Identifies explications of poems of a thousand lines or less.

Davis, Lloyd M. Contemporary American Poety: A Checklist. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

Davis, Lloyd M. Contemporary American Poetry: A Checklist: Second Series, 1973-1983. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985.

Donow, Herbert S. The Sonnet in England and America: A Bibliography of Criticism. Westport, Conn, 1982. Includes 200 pages on Shakespeare's sonnets.

Dyson, A. E. English Poetry: Select Bibliographical Guides. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Bibliographical essays surveying editions, biographies, bibliographies, letters, and critical studies for 20 major English poets, Chaucer to Eliot. Although dated, still useful for its generally reliable selection.

Guide to American Poetry Explication. Supersedes Joseph Kuntz' Poetry Explication, extending coverage to 1987. Unlike Kuntz, includes explications from books devoted to single authors, explications of poems of more than 500 lines, and adds many poets formerly excluded from the canon. It also includes Canadian poets and cites Canadian journals. Indispensable reference tool.

    * Vol. 1: Ruppert, James. Colonial and Nineteenth-century. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1989.
    * Vol. 2: Leo, John R. Modern and Contemporary. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1989.

Guide to British Poetry Explication. Boston, 1991-95. 4 volumes. vol. 1: Old English - Medieval; vol. 2: Renaissance; vol. 3: Restoration - Romantic; vol. 4: Victorian - Contemporary. Same concept and organization as the Guide to American Poetry Explication; standard checklist of criticisms of individual poems deemed most essential for students and scholars. A variety of critical perspectives (Marxist, psychological, linguistic, stylistic, deconstructionist, and feminist) are represented. The many anonymous poems of this period are listed by title; poets are listed alphabetically by last name; and under name headings, poems are listed alphabetically by title. Supercedes Kuntz's Poetry Explication (below).

Kuntz, Joseph. Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation Since 1925 of British and American Poems Past and Present. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. (See Guide to American Poetry Explication above.)

Reardon, Joan. Poetry by American Women, 1900-1975: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Reardon, Joan. Poetry by American Women, 1975-1989: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Spender, Stephen, and Donald Hall. The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry. 2nd ed. (revised in new format). London: Hutchinson, 1970. Encyclopedia edited by British poet, critic and novelist Stephen Spender. Includes a bibliography of works and critical material, as well as biographical information on major poets and general articles on various aspects of poetry.

For a complete list of electronic journals received at the library consult the Library's e-journals page - for a subset of titles in Language and Literatures, consult: Selected Literary Electronic Journals Available at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library.

For free online journals, you may also want to browse the Yahoo directory of online poetry magazines; as well as the list of links by the Academy of American Poets and those of the Poetry Society of America.

MSE Library currently subscribes to the following journals which regularly publish contemporary poets (see below). Because of the great number of journals and reviews that occasionally include poetry, this list is incomplete; please refer to the Library's catalog for complete access to our holdings. Note that the purpose of this list is to include titles that publish primary works; while many of these titles also publish critical essays and reviews of poetry, the list is not intended to include titles that focus on secondary literature and do not include primary works of poerty, as their number is too great to be listed here.

African American Review
Agenda
American Poetry Review
Arion
Atlantic Monthly
Beloit Poetry Journal
Black Warrior Review
Boston Review
Callaloo
Canadian Literature 
Chicago Review
CLR James Journal 
Confrontation
Critical Inquiry
Critical Quarterly
Critical Survey
Cumberland Poetry Review
Denver Quarterly
English
Epoch
Fence
Formalist
Georgia Review
Gettysburg Review
Grand Street
Greensboro Review
Hanging Loose
Harvard Review
Hollins Critic
Iowa Review
James White Review
Kenyon review
Literary Imagination
Massachusetts Review
Mississippi Review
Missouri Review
Modern Haiku
Modern Poetry in Translation
New England Review
New Letters
The New Republic
New York Quarterly
New Yorker
P.N. Review
Paris Review
Parnassus
Partisan Review
Ploughshares
PN Review
Poetica
Poetry
Sewanee Review
Southern Poetry Review
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Talisman
TriQuarterly
Unmuzzled Ox
Verse
West Coast Line
World Literature Today
World Literature Written in English

For further holdings of modern poetry journals, but to which we do not currently subscribe, please search the catalog under Subject:
American poetry -- 20th century -- Periodicals 
American poetry -- 21st century -- Periodicals
Poetry -- Periodicals

For a comprehensive listing of our resources in English literature, consult our Electronic Full Text Sources in English.

American Poetry Full-Text Database (pre-1900)
Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

American Verse Project (University of Michigan)
A collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. Provides access to an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

English Poetry, Second Edition
English Poetry, Second Edition redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of its ground-breaking predecessor with enhanced functionality and the addition of more than 20,000 poems from several new categories. Containing more than 183,000 poems by over 2,700 poets, the most comprehensive archive of English verse from the 8th century to the early 20th now offers incomparable representation both of the literary heritages of Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries and of the poetic legacies of English writers who have only been brought back to scholarly attention during the last thirty years. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

Faber Poetry Library
A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry
A database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Features 10,000 poems by around 70 of the most important African-American poets of the last century. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This unparalleled collection includes 52,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes by over 300 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Andrei Codrescu, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Cathy Song. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

Twentieth-Century English Poetry
A collection of 598 volumes of poetry by 283 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah and Carol Ann Duffy, and incorporating the poets in The Faber Poetry Library. The contents of the database may also be accessed through LION.

British Poetry 1780-1910: A Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions (University of Virginia)

Information on Archives and Repositories:

ArchivesUSA
Provides access to holdings and contact information for more than 4,800 repositories and indexes to over 109,000 special collections. Includes information from the Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the US, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States.

Archival Resources
The collection record file contains appproximately 500,000 bibliographic records for archival collections, and the collection guide file contains a growing number of searchable finding aids that provide a detailed inventory of the collection including the source, arrangement, and contents. (Access is restricted to UofC users.)

Repositories of Primary Sources
A listing of over 3,400 web sites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources.

Online poetry recordings:

Academy of American Poets Listening Booth
Extensive links to streaming audio of countless poets, including John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, W. S. Merwin, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and many well known and lesser known American poets.

Allen Ginsberg.org
Provides audio recordings of Ginsberg under "library".

Audio Interviews from the BBC
Recordings by Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Seamus Heaney, Robert Graves, Maya Angelou, E.E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, and more.

The BBC's Poetry Out Loud
This second site by the BBC contains numerous audio recordings of poets performing their own work. Included are Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott, Ogden Nash, Seamus Heaney, and more. The site distinguishes itself from the Audio Interviews by focusing on poetry and poets reading their works rather than interviews. It also contains numerous further poetry links.

EPC Sound & Radio Arts
A collection of sound poetry, audio art, audio hypermedia, and arts radio broadcasts.

Internet Poetry Archive
Links to streaming audio of select poems by featured poets: Phillip Levine, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wilbur.

The Lannan Foundation
The audio archives contain over 65 audio recordings of writers who participated in the Reading & Conversations series sponsored by the Foundation. The recordings include interviews with such authors, critics, and poets as Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Mark Strand, Eduardo Galeano, and Billy Collins.

Pennsound
An audio and video archive at the University of Pennsylvania providing access to the readings of countless poets and authors. Includes a link to the Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference, held at UPenn in Sept. 2004.

The Slought Foundation's recordings of the The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference
Provides access to 54 hours of recordings of New American poets including Ginsberg, Duncan, Olson, Creeley, Levertov & Avison, and more. Further recordings, such as Charles Olson reading and lecturing at Goddard College, 1962, are available through the archives under "recordings".

The Library holds numerous videos of poets reading their own works. The holdings include the complete Lannan Video Library series and numerous recordings of the American Poetry Archive of the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

All video materials are cataloged and available through the Library Catalog and may be best searched via the "advanced search" feature and limited to "Videos, DVDs, films, slides, etc." Videos may be checked out, renewed, and returned, following the same guidelines as for books. To check out a video, first retrieve the empty box from the video collection in Reading Room, Floor 3 (on the East side of the building, next to Microforms) and present the box at the Circulation Desk at the entrance of the Library, where you will receive the actual tape or DVD.

Online video recordings:

Poem Present
The University of Chicago's Poem Present readings and lectures are available online from 2003 on. Poets who have come to the University to read include Allen Grossman, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Robert Creeley, Lisa Jarnot, Mark Strand, and many more.

Poets On Screen (available through LION)
Part of the larger literature database, LION, Poets on Screen contains 269 clips of poets reading their own and other poets' work. This large and growing database features poets Fleur Adcock, Sujata Bhatt, Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, Jayne Cortez, Imtiaz Dharker, James Fenton, Selima Hill, P. J. Kavanagh, Roger McGough, Blake Morrison, Les Murray, and Jerome Rothenberg reading their own work, as well as poets such as Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Richard Wilbur, and more, reading other poets' work (poems by Emily Dickinson, Yeats, and others).

Pennsound
An audio and video archive at the University of Pennsylvania providing access to the readings of countless poets and authors. Includes a link to the Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference, held at UPenn in Sept. 2004.

Favorite Poem Project
Includes streaming video of poems read by the general public.

Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. The largest organization in the country dedicated to the art of poetry, the Academy sponsors programs nationally. The site provides bio- and bibliographical information, features poems and interviews, as well as poets reading their works and numerous helpful links to journals, societies, and other poetry web sites.

American Poetry Review
Browse the contents or read select articles and poetry online. The print is available in Current Periodicals and Stacks or online.

The Atlantic Montly Poetry Pages
The site contains poetry, critical appraisals of poets and their work, interviews with contemporary poets as well as audio readings of poems that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, including works by John Crowe Ransom, Maxine Kumin, Frank Bidard, Peter Davison, and Robert Pinsky. The site also features historic articles from the more distant past with poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly's first issue.

Canadian Poetry
A comprehensive resource on Canadian Poetry from the University of Toronto Library. Inludes bio-bibliographical information, poetry, links to magazines, publishers, and organizations, as well as events, prizes, etc.

Eclipse
Provides full text access to texts by contemporary poets; works by Clark Coolidge, Rae Armantrout, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews, among many others. The site also provides full text access to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, issues 1-13 + supplements; and to LEGEND, published by Andrews, Bernstein, DiPalma, McCaffery, and Silliman. Click here for the index. Additional articles by Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Frank O'Hara, and other poets are available at http://www.ubu.com/.

Electronic Poetry Center
Home of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo. The site provides online poetry, bio-bibliographic information on poets, extensive links to publishers, organizations, and resources. SUNY Buffalo is a center of modern poetry in the US and their Poetry/Rare Books Collection has some of the country's most extensive holdings of twentieth-century poetry books and manuscripts.

e-poets.network
Featuring contemporary poets and with an emphasis on experimental poetry, e-poets.net provides introductions to poets and their work, with links to audio and video recordings, in addition to a discussion list, articles, and links to further resources.

Exploring The Waste Land
A learning resource allowing exploration of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Part of the site uses a framed presentation of the poem with hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. Another part of the site is unframed and describes how to use the site, has pages of links to other sites, contains a bibliography, holds essays and supplementary material, gives theme paper help and so on.

Favorite Poem Project
Founded in 1997 by Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, the Favorite Poem Project contains videos of Americans reading their favorite poems.

Internet Poetry Archive
Sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the North Carolina Arts Council, the Internet Poetry Archive provides bio-bibliographic information, as well as poems and recordings for a select number of poets: Phillip Levine, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wilbur.

Little Magazines and Modernism
A site covering Modernist little magazines, linking three contemporaneous traditions that are usually studied as separate and distinct: Anglo-American modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and political poetry from the 1920s and '30s. The website was written and designed by students participating in the seminar, "On Lines: The Web of Modernism" (ENG 487, Fall 99) in consultation with Suzanne W. Churchill, Assistant Professor of English, Davidson College. Includes a description of Poetry, The Dial, The Egoist, Contact, Crisis, The Little Review, Anvil, and more.

Modern American Poetry
Created by the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Modern American Poetry provides select poems of 161 poets, extracted from the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

Octopus Magazine
"Octopus is an online poetry magazine named after a sea creature that is intelligent, lives in dens, and uses ink as a defense mechanism. Every issue features a combination of 8."

The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives
The center does not provide information for research or access to poetry, but informs of the activities of the center, including prizes and publications. It is listed here as the archive is one of the richest sources for audio and video recordings and the Library has purchased many copies of both for its Spoken Word and Video collections.

Poetry Center of Chicago
Explore and attend poetry readings and events in Chicago. The papers of The Poetry Center of Chicago and a complete set of the broadsides collection are on deposit with the University of Chicago Library.

Poetry Daily
Following the web site, the world's most popular poetry site. Features a different poet every day and generally includes critical comments on the poet.

The Poetry House at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland
Features an online magazine of poetry features and reviews; designed to be an authoritative guide to information about poetry across the English-speaking world. Its coverage is both historical (from Old English to the present) and geographical, taking in the world's major English-speaking areas.

Poetry Magazine
Web site of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded in 1912 in Chicago by Harriet Monroe. The web site of Poetry contains select full text and a historical index, among others.

Poetry on the Internet (Humbul Humanities Hub)
Maintained at Oxford University, the Humbul Humanities Hub aims at selecting and organizing valuable web resources in all areas of the Humanities. This guide to poetry on the Internet provides comprehensive access to online poetry resources, including Anthologies and Collections; Individual Author Sites; General Critical Sites; Online Journals; and Poetics and Language. Although not restricted to modern poetry, the guide is highly recommended.

Poetry Portal
A commercial, yet useful portal to all things related to poetry on the web. Listed here as it contains numerous helpful sections on criticism, a glossary, and a wealth of information going beyond modern poetry or poetry in English.

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church
Provides select poetry of poets through its webzine Poets & Poems; announcements and information on the center's three weekly reading series; writing workshops; access to the newsletter and the annual literary magazine, The World. Also features the "Tiny Press Center", a resource center for publishers, including essays by small publishers, reviews, and excerpts from publications, as well as links to other poetry sites.

Poetry Society of America, Links
The Poetry Society of America is the parent organization of the Favorite Poem Project (see above) and provides information about membership, poetry readings and events, the chapbook contest, and various other services. Its list of links is one of the most comprehensive collection of poetry resources on the web.

Representative Poetry Online
This online edition of W. J. Alexander edition of Representative Poetry, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1912, includes about 2,900 English poems by over 400 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets. Though most of the poetry is by pre-20th Century authors, Representative Poetry Online is a helpful resource for finding poetry by early 20th Century poets online. Includes a timeline, links to criticism, a glossary, and a highly useful bibliography.

Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry
The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive was founded in 1979 with the mission to "establish a collection of books, critical texts, periodicals, ephemera, prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, objects, manuscripts, and correspondence dealing with precedent and contemporary, internationally produced, concrete and visual poetry." Starting with Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, “Un Coup de Des” (Cosmopolis, 1897) the archive covers historic examples of "works with concrete/visual poetic sensibilities from such twentieth century art movements as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme, and Ultra-Lettrisme."

UbuWeb
Difficult to define, UbuWeb may be described as an online archive of literature and art. Includes numerous poems(including concrete and sound poetry), essays, and other texts, as well as sound recordings and more.

Verse at Bartleby.com
The "Verse" section at Bartleby.com provides access to the full text of numerous anthologies and collections of poetry, from Virgil to Milton, to Eliot to Frost.

Web del sol
A commercial portal to poetry on the web, web del sol provides extensive poetry resources, such as links to major online poetry journals, electronic chapbooks, criticism and book reviews, poetry work shops and writing programs, links, and more.

Yahoo directory of online poetry magazines
A surprisingly comprehensive list of online poetry magazines; to be consulted with the list of the Academy of American Poets and the links of the Poetry Society of America.

African American Biographical Database. Chadwyck-Healey. Based on Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950.

Biography and Genealogy Master Index. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale Research Co., c1980-. (Online version available). A consolidated index to biographical sketches in current and retrospective biographical dictionaries.

Bea, Joseph, ed. Biography Index. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1946-. (Online version available)A cumulative and comprehensive index to biographical material published in books and magazines. International in scope, though only containing English language materials, the index is published quarterly with annual and biannual cumulations. Includes index by profession.

Dictionary of American Biography. New York, 1928-37. 21 volumes, plus supplements. -- Published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies. Lengthy, signed biographical articles, with bibliographies. Original set included biographies of 14,000 noted Americans

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, Oxford University Press, 2004. 60 vols. (Online version available). Coverage extends from the earliest times to 2000. The most authoritative reference source for English biography; contains signed articles by specialists.

Garraty, John A. and Carnes, Mark C., eds. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. (Online version available).

Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers. Detroit, 1962 to date. (Electronic version is available through Literary Resource Center). Covers writers of books only, chiefly English-language authors. Not limited to literary figures. Sketches give personal facts, career, work in progress, bibliography of writings, and biographical sources. Related titles include the First Revision, the New Revision, and the Permanent Revision series which include revised and updated biographies. The Cumulative Index covers all series.

Contemporary Poets. 6th ed. New York, 1996

Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, 1978- --. (Online version available through Literature Resource Center.) Lengthy illustrated biographical and critical articles, with bibliographies. Each volume focuses on a specific time period and country (mostly the US and Britain) and includes a cumulative index. Numerous volumes on British and American poets, playwrights, novelists, etc. Note: To find a volume by title, authors, subject, or keyword (such as "Beats"), consult the Indian University's online guide.

Haralson, Eric L., ed. Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The 19th Century. Chicag Fitzroy Dearborn Pubs, 1998. (Note: this is only available through the electronic resource, Literature Online aka LION). Provides biographical information concerning more than 100 poets, gives critical evaluations of their works, and places them in their literary, historical, and cultural context. Each entry ends with a selected list of the poet's works and a bibliography of secondary publications. (Choice, December 1998)

______. Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The 20th Century. Chicag Fitzroy Dearborn Pubs, 2001.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, 1993. (Also available in e-format through Literature Online aka LION). The standard, authoritative encyclopedia on the subject with surveys of 106 national poetries, descriptions of forms, genres, and devices, movements and issues in criticism and theory, etc.

Spender, Stephen, and Donald Hall. The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry. London: Hutchinson, 1963. Encyclopedia edited by British poet, critic and novelist Stephen Spender. Includes a bibliography of works and critical material, as well as biographical information on major poets and general articles on various aspects of poetry.

For a list of online English language dictionaries, consult Modern Literatures' Electronic Reference Sources page.

Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Index : A Guide to 500 Literary Movements, Groups, Schools, Tendencies, and Trends of the Twentieth Century, Covering More Than 3,000 Novelists, Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, Artists, and Other Seminal Thinkers from 80 Countries as Found in Standard Literary Reference Works, Literary Movements Reference Series. Detroit, Mich.: Omnigraphics, 2000. An index reference sources, the first part indexes literary movements of the 20th century, including significant schools of literary criticism; the second part is an index of individuals. (Balay)

Poetic Byway provides a useful online Glossary of Poetic Terms. Crossreferences, the glossary provides a broad range of definitions, including poetic quotations and phonetic pronunciation.

Hamilton, Ian, ed. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Criteria for inclusion are: the poet must have lived (however briefly) in this century, must have written in English, must be at least 30 years old, and must have published one "substantial" work of poetry. Poets, movements, magazines, and hoaxes are in alphabetical order with numerous cross-references.

Roberts, Neil, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry. Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Contains 48 well written and informative essays. Contributions are organized into five sections: "Topics and Debates," "Poetic Movements," "International and Postcolonial Poetry in English," "Readings," and "The Contemporary Scene." The section on poetic movements provides valuable information on "Imagism," "The New Negro Renaissance," "Poetry and the New Criticism," "Black Mountain and Projective Verse," "The Beats," "Confessionalism," "The Movement," and "Language Poetry." Contains bibliographies at the end of each essay and a section on "Readings", which offers fresh perspectives on canonical texts, including T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, Wallace Stevens's Harmonium, Elizabeth Bishop's North & South, Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos, Seamus Heaney's North, Derek Walcott's Omeros, and other works. (Choice, January 2002)

Poet's market. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, c1985-. An annual guide to "Where & how to publish your poetry." Provides information on over 1,800 book, journal and magazine publishers and editors, as well as on grants, conferences, workshops, poetry contests, and more. Includes a section on submission strategies and special markets for young poets. The latest issue is available at the Regenstein, Reading Room, Floor 1 next to the Reference Desk. Back issues are held in the stacks.

The Literary Market Place (LMP). New York : R.R. Bowker, c1988-. LMP is the most comprehensive directory of America and Canadian book publishing available, containing information on publishers, literary agents, distributors & sales representatives, wholesalers, printers, translators and interpreters, and more.

Digital Dissertations-- new version will begin 7/21  (All US JHU)

Index to theses with abstracts accepted for higher degrees by the universities of Great Britain and Ireland and the Council for National Academic Awards.
The online version of the Index covers theses done since 1970 from over 150 colleges and universities and can be searched by author, title, abstract, date, and university.

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