Poetry Research Essay
Books
Uni High Library has the following reference works that provide biographical information on poets, information on poetic schools and movements, and bibliographical references:
| Facts on File 20th Century American Poetry | R 811.09 F119 |
| Critical Survey of Poetry | R 821.09 |
| Contemporary American Ethnic Poets | R 811.09 C76722 |
| other literature reference sources in the R 810s | |
You can also browse our shelves in the 808 and 811 Dewey ranges for works by specific poets.
Use the online catalog to find criticism on your poet or poetic school or movement. First, determine the correct subject heading for your topic by doing a Quick Search for Subject Headings. Some are straightforward: Imagist Poetry. Others may be more difficult to find: Beat generation--Poetry, rather than Beat Poetry. Works on poets will likely follow this format: Sandburg, Carl, 1878-1967--Criticism and interpretation. If you have a hard time finding a subject heading do a keyword search with your term in quotes to see which subject headings are assigned to works on your topic.
Reference sources
If you search these resources from home, you will be prompted to supply your NetID and password.
Literature Resource Center identifies biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Coverage of more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. This database only allows 4 simultaneous users.
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry includes 13,000 public domain poems in full-text that can be searched by title, first line, last line, author, subject and keyword. It also contains commentaries, biographies, and short bibliographies.
Journal articles
If you search these databases from home, you will be prompted to supply your NetID and password.
These databases will help you find criticism on poets:
The MLA (Modern Language Association) Bibliography indexes literary criticism from 1963 to the present. Note that it is not a full-text resource. Once you find a promising citation, click on the link that will take you to a search in the online catalog or to full text that might be available through another database. You can also try a search for the journal title in the Online Research Resources page.
JSTOR searches full-text for backfile articles and reviews in over 130 multi-disciplinary journals. See Project Muse (below) for more recent articles.
Project Muse searches full-text in over 150 journals supplied by 10 university presses. Click on the search button to start your search. Muse works well for more recent periodical issues, while JSTOR (see above) reproduces older volumes.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature, including: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Take a look at the Advanced Search Tips for ways to get better search results.
Also consider the general periodical databases that are linked to from the Library's home page. Your best bets are WilsonSelectPlus, Ebsco's Academic Search Premier, and Infotrac's Expanded Academic ASAP.
Websites and Other Resources
Librarians' Internet Index links to librarian-recommended websites.
The English Library's list Full-text Primary Resources links to a number of searchable databases that provide the full text of thousands of poems.
Finally...
Create your annotated bibliography using the Advanced MLA format on NoodleBib. Or, do it yourself, consulting our MLA style guide.