About
About Poetry Connection
Poetry from around the world, online since 2003.
What’s here
The archive holds 8,657 poems by 196 poets, from Homer, around 750 BC, to poets writing today. Each poem has its own page, with the text laid out as the poet or translator wrote it: line breaks, indents and stanzas as they are in the source.
Poets from around the world
The site was started for poets from outside the United States. Most wrote in English: in Britain and Ireland above all, and in Australia, Canada, the Caribbean and the United States. 52 of them wrote in other languages, 18 in all, from Chinese and Japanese to Arabic, Hebrew and Polish, and are read here in translation. The front page lists them by language. A translation carries its translator’s name wherever it is known.
Readers
Readers have commented since 2004, and 6,068 of their comments are on the site: close readings, questions from students, memories of poems learned at school, and corrections that have made the texts better. New comments are read before they appear.
Linked from
Pages here are linked from The Guardian, CBS News, Wikipedia, University of Cambridge and The Kenyon Review, among others. Each of these links has been checked.
A sister site
Poetry Connection began as a sister site to American Poems, which collects American poets.
Corrections and questions
If you find a mistake in a poem, a date or a translator’s name, please tell us through the contact page. Many of the texts have been improved by readers.