The works of more than 1,250 poets from 600 to 1900
English Poetry contains over 165,000 poems drawn from 4,500 printed sources. It is, in essence, a database of the complete English poetic canon from Anglo-Saxon times to the end of the nineteenth century. By aiming to include the works of all poets, it adds lesser-known work to the familiar mainstream and offers to literary and linguistics scholars and cultural historians a more complete context for research than has ever been available before. This comprehensiveness is combined with software which enables users to search and browse it in scores of different ways.
English Poetry will be the starting point for scholarly research programmes as yet undreamed of.
It provides teachers with an incomparable collection of study texts and it enables librarians to offer their readers an unbeatable enquiry service. No longer are searches restricted to the first lines of the best-known poems - every line by nearly every published poet can be searched and read with ease.
The bibliographic basis of English Poetry is the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, CUP 1969-72 (NCBEL). The database includes the works of those writers listed as poets by NCBEL, those writers whose main entry appears under another genre but who are cross-referenced to Poetry and a few additional writers of poetry not cross-referenced. Works in English of Welsh, Scottish and Irish poets are included.
The entire text of each poem is included. Any accompanying text written by the poet and forming an integral part of the poem, such as dedications, notes, arguments and epigraphs, is also generally included. The text is coded by its structural elements using Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML).
English Poetry delivers a significant part of the English literary heritage in a form which invites enquiry and offers virtually unlimited prospects of discovery.
Every purchaser of the CD-ROM edition receives two complete sets, enabling its use both in the library and, for example, the Department of English. English Poetry is also available on magnetic tape.
5 CD-ROMs
Windows
Multimedia CD-ROM