About The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry®

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry contains 300,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations, numbers that will continually expand with each update. The poems in full text are the most widely-read in the English language, as well as in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Included also is poetry in Portuguese, Polish, Yiddish, Welsh, Gaelic, and other Celtic languages, as well as poems in the ancient languages: Anglo-Saxon, Provencal and Latin. Scholars in each of these languages have reviewed and guided the selection of poems, so that the poetry on Granger’s is also the poetry encountered in the classroom.

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry offers complete coverage of the works of several individual great poets, including the complete poems of Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and other major poets.

In addition users will find a wealth of current poetry from some of the best poetry periodicals, such as Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest.


Largest and Most Comprehensive Subject Browse

Granger’s 6,000 subject headings are organized in a hierarchical structure of related themes and categories. This gives users a unique opportunity to explore and discover poetry in a meaningful and visual manner. For instance, “Children’s Literature” is one of the many subjects under “Literature,” which falls under the top, or umbrella, category “Arts and Entertainment.” The subject “Fairy Tales” is under “Children’s Literature,” and one of the subjects under this is “The Grimm Brothers.” The final, sixth category, under “The Grimm Brothers,” contains some of the Grimm fairy tales about which there are poems in Granger’s—“Cinderella,” “The Frog Prince,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Snow White.” Poems can be found under each category and sub-category. In this way a user’s search can be as broad-325 poems under “Children’s Literature,” or narrow-3 poems under “The Frog Prince,” as desired.

 

Commentaries

There are numerous commentaries on individual poems written by William Harmon and a team of scholars. Each commentary puts the poem in its historical context and describes, when necessary, "what happens" in the poem. It provides notes on proper names and difficult terms and explains the form of the poem and the author's technique. It provides also a bibliography on the poem. Throughout the commentaries are links to other poems by the same poet, to other poems on the same subject, and to other poets.

 

Biographies of Leading Poets

Each biography is followed by a short bibliography, consisting typically of the standard edition of the author's collected poems, the standard biography of the poet, and a standard critical work on the author. Each biography provides links to some of the poet's most important poems. These are written by William Harmon and other scholars.
 

Key Columbia Poetry Titles Included

In addition to providing hundreds of thousands of poems in full text, The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry offers the full text of award-winning books of and about poetry published by Columbia University Press. These titles include:

  • Chinese Lyricism
  • The Classic Hundred Poems
  • Classic Writings on Poetry
  • The Columbia History of American Poetry
  • The Columbia History of British Poetry
  • Dismantling Glory: 20th-Century Soldier Poetry
  • Edwin Arlington Robinson
  • Modern East Asian Literature
  • Randall Jarrell and His Age
  • Shakespeare and the Poet’s War
  • Sources of Japanese Tradition
  • The Top 500 Poems
  • The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin

 

The Columbia Granger’s print indexes are also included:

  • The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies editions 8–13
  • The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works, editions 1-2
  • The Columbia Granger's Index to African-American Poetry
The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies was created by Edith Granger, of McClurg's bookstore in Chicago, in 1904. You can learn all about her on the web site "The Edith Granger Project" created by Audra Melissa Birek here: https://sites.google.com/site/edithgrangerproject/. For more information about the history and roots of Granger's, see an interview in the blog Poetry and Popular Culture: http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/2009/10/poetry-popular-culture-heroes-interview.html

 


 


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