Poetry across languages
Lyric, devotional, philosophical, epic and modern poetry from India and the wider world, presented through lawful editions and responsible translation notes.
Classical, devotional and modern voices
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore
Find lawful editions ↗Poems of Kabir
Kabir · historical English renderings
Historical translations ↗Meghadūta
Kālidāsa · “The Cloud Messenger”
Search editions ↗Gīta Govinda
Jayadeva
Search editions ↗Tirukkural
Tiruvalluvar · translation rights vary
Consult editions ↗Subramania Bharati
National, devotional and reformist poetry
Search repository ↗Tukaram
Devotional poetry of the Varkari tradition
Search translations ↗Bulleh Shah
Punjabi Sufi poetry; translation rights vary
Search editions ↗Verse across philosophical and courtly traditions
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Historical Fitzgerald rendering
Public-domain editions ↗Hafez
Classical Persian lyric poetry
Search translations ↗Rumi
Historical translations and selections
Find historical editions ↗Matsuo Bashō
Haiku and travel writing; translation rights vary
Search editions ↗Li Bai and Du Fu
Tang poetry; individual translations may be protected
Search translations ↗From epic and sonnet to modern free verse
The Iliad and Odyssey
Homer · historical translations
Find editions ↗The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Find editions ↗Sonnets
William Shakespeare
Read editions ↗Songs of Innocence and of Experience
William Blake
Find editions ↗Selected Poems
William Wordsworth, John Keats and P. B. Shelley
Browse editions ↗Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Read editions ↗Poems
Emily Dickinson
Find editions ↗Fernando Pessoa
Poetry under multiple literary identities
Search editions ↗INDIAN LANGUAGES IN VERSE
Poetry beyond a single canon
Kuṟuntokai and Puṟanāṉūṟu
Interior and public worlds: love, separation, war, generosity, impermanence and the landscapes through which emotion is organised.
Āṇḍāḷ
Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi join lyric intensity, theology, ritual calendar and a distinctive female devotional voice.
Lalleshwari / Lal Ded
Vākh poetry associated with spiritual inquiry, embodied experience and Kashmir’s intersecting Śaiva and Sufi worlds.
Mīrābāī
Songs of devotion, refusal and longing transmitted across performance, oral memory and shifting attributed collections.
Kazi Nazrul Islam
Revolutionary, devotional and humanist poetry whose language moves across Islamic, Hindu and modern political imagery.
Mahadevi Varma
Chhayavad lyricism, inwardness, compassion and an influential modern prose and poetic voice.
Kumaran Asan
Poetry of social equality, Buddhist narrative, love, mortality and Kerala’s modern intellectual transformation.
Vachana poets
Basava, Akka Mahadevi, Allama Prabhu and others shaped a radical, compressed devotional and ethical form.
AFRICA, THE AMERICAS & OCEANIA
Poetry, history and place
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Baroque poetry and intellectual defence by a major writer of colonial New Spain.
Find available editions →Rubén Darío
Musical innovation, cosmopolitan imagery and the transformation of modern Spanish-language verse.
Browse available works →Phillis Wheatley
An early published African American poet whose work must be read within slavery, classicism, religion and the Atlantic world.
Find public-domain editions →Paul Laurence Dunbar
Lyric, dialect, race and public performance in post-Reconstruction American literature.
Browse available works →Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson
Competing visions of labour, hardship, humour and bush identity, read critically within settler history.
Browse public-domain collections →Poetry and custodianship
Indigenous poetry is not treated as anonymously available folklore. Living authors, communities, permissions and cultural protocols govern access and reuse.
Poetry is more than a list of poets
Each form carries its own expectations of metre, voice, memory, performance and transmission. The catalogue therefore records form and cultural setting alongside author and title.
Śloka, kāvya and mahākāvya
Verse forms spanning epic narration, courtly poetry, philosophy, devotion and ornate literary composition.
Sangam landscapes
Interwoven conventions of interior and public life, where landscape, emotion, warfare, generosity and impermanence form a poetic grammar.
Doha, pada, abhanga and vachana
Compact, sung and recited forms shaped by bhakti, ethical reflection, pilgrimage, community and oral transmission.
Ghazal, nazm and kafi
Distinct lyric and reflective traditions whose rhyme, refrain, metre and performance cannot be reduced to subject matter alone.
Waka, haiku and linked verse
Highly disciplined short forms attentive to season, occasion, image, allusion and the relation between compression and silence.
Sonnet, ode and elegy
Forms repeatedly reshaped across languages, courts, churches, print cultures and modern literary movements.
Recitation, song and memory
Long poems live through performers, listeners, ritual settings and regional retellings as well as written editions.
Free verse and experiment
Poetry responding to industrialisation, war, migration, gender, race, nation, urban life and transformations of the speaking voice.
Original language, translation and voice
Poetry changes materially in translation. Where possible, this catalogue will record the original language, translator, edition date and source repository. Future editorial notes will place poems beside their metrical, devotional, oral or performance traditions rather than treating every poem as isolated text.