With National Poetry Month underway and our own Celebrating National Poetry Month event this Thursday, April 17, the Mechanics’ Institute is excited to announce the addition of a new online resource that all members can access: The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry.
Granger's is a poetry database that includes the full text of over 300,000 poems, as well as commentaries, biographies, and more. Scholars review and guide selections, and they are updated regularly so that the collection continues to grow.
Within Granger's, you’ll find the complete poems of major figures like Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and more. There is also poetry in other languages, such as Spanish, French, German, and Italian, as well as ancient languages like Anglo-Saxon, Provencal, and Latin.
What makes Granger's special is the tools it offers for discovering and studying poetry. For example, let’s say I want to look for poems about, oh, I don’t know, cows. If I use the Granger's subject list, I find this:
316 poems about cows! But also, 53 poems about crabs. Browsing the cow poems, I eventually find the full text of this Thomas Hardy poem:
There are many tools that we encourage you to explore. You can search by the text of the first line of a poem (or the last line). You can search by school of poetry, form, era, and more.
Another fun tool to play with is the Compare Poems feature. If you’re interested in the art of translation, this might be of interest.
In another example, here I’m looking at Mallarme’s translation of Poe’s The City in the Sea side-by-side with the original:
Whether you’re a poetry lover looking for scholarly insights or a poet in search of inspiration from great works, Granger's is sure to have something to offer for you.
You can access Granger's from home using your Mechanics’ Institute member card at this link, or via any computer in the library. If you have any questions about how to use the database, please feel free to ask the library staff.
