The poetical works of over 200 authors from the earliest American poets of the seventeenth century to the beginnings of modernism.
American Poetry is the largest collection to date of poetry by American authors. It provides new access for all scholars of American literature to the most influential American poets active before 1920. It is an invaluable resource for any library, both as a reference and as a research tool, enabling the study of the literary, historical and linguistic development of American poetry.
The selection of authors in American Poetry is based on a modified body of significant American poets included in the Bibliography of American Literature, Yale University Press 1955-1991. These are supplemented by other authors recommended by a distinguished panel of scholars and bibliographers and including popular and influential poems selected from the canon of American poetry.
The complete text of each poem is included. Any accompanying text written by the original author and forming an integral part of the work, such as notes, dedications and prefaces to individual poems, is also generally included.
As well as the more familiar names such as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, American Poetry uniquely provides access to a large number of other authors whose works are much less readily available.
A selection of key representative anthologies of American poetry has also been included. These anthologies are reproduced in full, including editorial matter. They afford scholars and researchers an insight into the literary and cultural evaluation of American poetry in different periods.
All the texts are fully and consistently encoded throughout. An intuitive interface presents the user with easy access to the corpus and enables sophisticated searches to be carried out quickly and easily in a way which has never before been possible with these texts.
Publication is scheduled for April 1996. American Poetry is also available on magnetic tape for institutions wishing to network it with their own retrieval software.
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