Topic: Representative Poetry Online is a wonderful online library of poetry

[Software Santa]

Representative Poetry Online is a wonderful online library with thousands of free e-books which you can read in your Web browser.

https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/

READER, enter here, through indexes of ...

    * the poets, alphabetically by last name or chronologically
    * their poems, by title
    * their poems, by first line or last line
    * a timeline, of poets, poems, and events
    * a calendar, the year's days
    * a keyword search of words in the poems
    * a glossary, of poetic terms and forms
    * writings on poetry, by great poets and readers
    * bibliography and links
    * what's new, or
    * UTEL, the outermost English library ...


The Online Versions

Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, includes 4,700 English poems by 723 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912 (one of the first books published by the University of Toronto Press), and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s.

Its electronic founder and editor since 1994 is Ian Lancashire, who is a member of the Department of English, University of Toronto. He edits the poems in affection for and gratitude to their authors, whose works enrich and restore our lives.

The bibliographical sources from which the selections are made hold great libraries of poetry for readers and critics venturing out on their own, and for the reader interested in reading more by one poet. If you enjoy these poems, you may also learn from them by growing interested in the poets, the periods in which they lived, and the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the conversations which poets have with their predecessors.

The first online version (Dec. 15, 1994) offered poems in the third edition of Representative Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962-63, reprinted with corrections 1967), a historical collection of some 730 poems by about 80 poets from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Algernon Charles Swinburne. The second online version (Sept. 31, 1996) was supplemented by many poets and poems appearing in the edition of 1935 (revised and enlarged, 1941-46) but not carried over into the 1962-63 edition for lack of space. In 1997-98, poems found in the editions of 1912 and 1916 that did not find a place afterwards were added, with notes. Several hundred new poets and UTEL (University of Toronto Library), a collection of texts and writings by Department members, were created at that time.

In 2000-2002, funded by the Office of the Provost, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Department of English, RPO was transformed from a collection of HTML files into a relational database. Ian Lancashire devised the database fields, and Dr. Marc Plamondon programmed and implemented the database. Sian Meikle, the University's Digital Librarian, supervised programming, with help from Alan Darnell. Dr. Plamondon, with help from Christopher Jennings and Ian Lancashire, transferred poems, one by one, from the old HTML site into the database. The conversion enabled the team to expand information about the poets (work undertaken by Katrine Raymond) and Dr. Plamondon to add a last-line index, and, among many other things, to automate index production and put in place a concordance search. RPO Version 3 came online on October 16, 2002. Marc Plamondon became associate editor on June 1st, 2005.

Since 1994, the general editor has newly prepared several hundred poets not in the original printed editions and added them to the online version.  Version 3.0 also offers six indexes (title, first-line, poets, timeline, calendar of year's days, glossary, and the poets' works by date of birth), a bibliography, and a search engine that are not in any printed edition.

The texts of the poems in the printed editions are based on the books or manuscripts in which they originally appeared. Their spelling was generally normalized in the edited volumes. New texts, found only in the online version, are transcribed from original editions, mainly without altered spelling.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/