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Open Access & Open Educational Resources for English and American Literature

Poetry Resources

American Verse Project
The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

The First World War Digital Poetry Archive
The site at Oxford University contains over 7000 items of text, images, audio and video for teaching, learning, and research. Consists of primary material from major poets of the period.

Modern American Poetry Site
MAPS is a scholarly learning environment and forum devoted to the study of modern and contemporary American poetry. Contains biographies, critical essays, syllabi and images on 161 poets.

The Poetry Archive
You can listen to the world's great poets at this site. Available for downloading or streaming.You can also watch video interviews with poets as they answer questions about their inspirations and influences. Collections also include poems for study, poems for teaching, and children's poems.

Poetry Center Digital Archive
Poetry Center Digital Archive makes available significant portions of early audio recordings from the Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection, supplemented by select archival texts and images. 

Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is an independent literary organization established in 2003 whose purpose is to promote poetry in American culture and make it available to a wide audience. It also publishes Poetry magazine. You can explore poets by school, explore poems by themes, listen to audio poems, and more.

Poets.org
You can search an extensive collection of over 7,000 poems by theme, occasion or form, or search by keyword or poet's name. You can find poetry lesson plans most of which are aligned with the Common Core, essays about teaching, a glossary of poetry terms, and more.

Presidents as Poets
Poetry written by presidents of the United States can be found here.

Representative Poetry Online
This site contains a collection of poetry, edited by members of the Department of English at the University of Toronto from 1912 to the present.