January 2011 (Version 3.0.5)

Current Statistics

• Total poets: 601
• Total poems: 3,976
• Total lines: 252,362
• Total line notes: 17,176
• Total poem commentaries: 30


New Poets (66).
American (20):

• Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979): "At the Fishhouses," "Brazil, January 1, 1502," "In the Waiting Room," "Sestina";
  
• James A. Bland (1854-1911): "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," "In The Evening By The Moonlight," "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers!";
  
• Lucille Bogan (1897-1948): "Coffee Grindin' Blues," "Shave 'em Dry," "Stew Meat Blues," "Tired as I can Be";
  
• Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996): "An autumn evening in the modest square," "Six Years Later";
  
• Shelton Brooks (1886-1975): "The Darktown Strutters' Ball";
  
• George M. Cohan (1878-1942): "Give my Regards to Broadway";
  
• Lena Guilbert Ford (1870-1918): "Keep the Home Fires Burning";
  
• Lil Green (1919-1954): "How Can I Go on," "What's the Matter with Love";
  
• Ida Cox (1896-1967): "Blues Ain't Nothin' Else But," "Fogyism";
  
• William Christopher Handy (1873-1958): "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues";
  
• Alberta Hunter (1895-1984): "Down Hearted Blues";
  
• Thomas S. Jones, Jr. (1882-1932): "The Little Ghosts," "Sometimes";
  
• Kenneth Koch (1925-2002): "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams";
  
• Denise Levertov (1923-1997): "Caedmon";
  
• Meade Minnigerode (1887-1967): "The Whiffenpoof Song";
  
• Alicia Ostriker (1937-): "Holocaust";
  
• Bessie Smith (1894-1937): "Empty Bed Blues";
  
• Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902): "Nameless Pain";
  
• Clara Ann Thompson (1869-1949): "Mrs. Johnson Objects";
  
• Septimus Winner (1827-1902): "Ten Little Injuns"
  

Canadian (11):

• Mary Frances Leslie Ames (fl. 1899-1900): "An ABC for Baby Patriots";
  
• Margaret Atwood (1939-): "Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age," "The Explorers," "Flowers," "Habitation," "Heart Test with an Echo Chamber," "My Mother Dwindles ... ," "Night Poem," "Notes towards a Poem that can never be Written," "Postcard," "Roominghouse, Winter," "She," "Siren Song," and "yes at first";
  
• Earle Birney (1904-1995): "Never Blush to Dream," "Anglosaxon Street," "Answers to a Grade-School Biology Test," "The Bear on the Delhi Road," "Bestiary," "Canada: Case History: 1945," "David" (with commentary), "El Greco: Espolio," "My Love is Young," "Plaza de la Inquisición";
  
• Christian Bök (1966-): "Birefringence," "Vowels";
  
• John Robert Colombo (1936-): "Confession," "I See Her," "Oh Canada," "Post-Mortem," "Rhymed Proverbs," "There is No Way Out," "The Unfair Sex";
  
• Christopher Dafoe (1936-): "Forty Below";
  
• George Thomas Lanigan (1846-1886): "The Ahkoond of Swat";
  
• Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987): "Letter to a Future Generation";
  
• Jay Macpherson (1931-): "Abominable Snowman," "The Day-Labourer," "Eurynome," "The Island," "Old Age of the Teddy-B ear," "Poets & Muses," "Some Ghosts & Some Ghouls," "Substitutions," "Very Sad Song";
  
• Anne Marriott (1913-1997): "Crying in Sleep," "On Reading that I am 'Elderly,'" "Prairie Graveyard," "The Wind our Enemy";
  
• Carol Shields (1935-2003): "Entry," "Fall," "Getting Born," "Letter from a Friend," "The Methodist Jesus," "The New Mothers," "Old Men," "Wedding"

English (30):

• William Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813-1865): "The Faking Boy to the Crap is Gone," and "The Mishap";
  
• Julian Bell (1908-1937): "Catullus," "London I," "London II," "Nonsense," "November," "Visualization of Marxism";
  
• John Betjeman (1906-1984): "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel," "The Cottage Hospital," "In Westminster Abbey," "An Incident in the Early Life of Ebenezer Jones, Poet, 1828," "Indoor Games near Newbury," "Meditation on the A30," "N.W. 5 & N. 6", "Seaside Golf," "Slough," "A Subaltern's Love-song," "Sun and Fun";
  
• Laurence Binyon (1869-1943): "Angered Reason," "For the Fallen," "The Reformer," "Stonehenge";
  
• Christopher Caudwell (1907-1937): "The Firing Party," "The Kingdom of Heaven," "On Dryden," "Poem," "Twenty Sonnets of Wm. Smith";
  
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936): "Answers to the Poets," "The Great Minimum";
  
• Rupert John Cornford (1915-1936): "A Letter from Aragon," "Sergei Mironovitch Kirov," "[To Margot Heinemann]";
  
• Francis Coutts (1852-1923): "On a Wife";
  
• Charles d' Orléans (1394-1465): "Ballade 60," "Love's Renewal," "Ye are to moche as in my dette madame," "The smylyng mouth and laughyng eyen gray," "Myn hert thou fondis bi this light," "O thou fortune that causist pepille playne";
  
• Henry Cust (1861-1917): "Non Nobis, Domine";
  
• Harry Dacre (1860-1922): "Daisy Bell" (i.e., "Bicycle Built for Two");
  
• John Donne (1572-1631): all poems added from Oxford editions (118 poems);
  
• John Dryden (1631-1700): "The Third Satire of Juvenal Translated into English Verse" edited by John D. Baird;
  
• Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849): "Epigram" ("'Prepare to meet the King of Terrors', cried"), "Epigram" ("Companionship in toil or sorrow"), "Song," "Written with a Pencil in Darfield Churchyard";
  
• Rose Fyleman (1877-1957): "Fairies";
  
• Gerald Gould (1885-1936): "Seagulls," "Twilight";
  
• William Noel Hodgson (1893-1916): "Before Action";
  
• Jack Judge (1862-1938): "It's a Long Way to Tipperary";
  
• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): 24 poems;
  
• Mina Loy (1882-1966): "Human Cylinders," "Lunar Baerdeker";
  
• John Masefield (1878-1967): "The Blacksmith," "Blown Hilcote Manor," "C. L. M.," "Cape Horn Gospel -- I," "The Everlasting Mercy," "Fragments," "[Let that which is to come be as it may...]," "Posted as Missing," "The Racer," "Reynard the Fox; or, The Ghost Heath Run," "The River," "Sea-Fever," "Spanish Waters," "[There is no God, as I was taught in youth...]," "Vagabond," "Waste";
  
• Thomas Middleton (c. 1580-c. 1627): "To Teach thy Base Thoughts Manners";
  
• Henry John Newbolt (1862-1938): "April on a Waggon Hill," "Drake's Drum," "The Sailing of the Long-ships," "Vitai Lampada," "The Wanderer";
  
• John Oldham (1653-1683): "A Satire, in Imitation of the Third of Juvenal," edited by John D. Baird;
  
• Walter Pope (1628-1714): "The Old Man's Wish";
  
• George Henry Powell (1880-1951): "Pack up your Troubles in your Old Kit-bag";
  
• Stevie Smith (1902-1971): "Dear Muse," "My Muse," "Not Waving but Drowning," "Our Bog is Dood," "Sunt Leones";
  
• Jon Stallworthy (1935-): "From the Life," "The Girl from Zlot," "Le Violon d'Ingres," "War Song of the Embattled Finns";
  
• Dion Titherage (1889-1934): "And her Mother Came too";
  
• Frederick Edward Weatherly (1848-1929): "Danny Boy"

Irish (3):

• Mary Balfour (1775?-1819): "A Saying of the Old Duke of Ormond's, Versified";
  
• Charlotte Eliza Dixon (fl. 1814-1830): "Another Lady," "To my Spinning Wheel";
  
• Joseph Medlicott Scriven (1819-1886): "What a Friend we have in Jesus";
  
• W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): 42 poems added, "After Long Silence," "All Things can tempt Me," "Among School Children," "Byzantium," "The Choice," "The Circus Animals' Desertion," "A Coat," "Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop," "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," "Down by the Salley Gardens," "Easter 1916," "Ego Dominus Tuus," "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," "Introductory Rhymes," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree,""Lapis Lazuli," "A Last Confession," "Leda and the Swan," "Long-Legged Fly," "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart," "The Magi," "The Man who dreamed of Faeryland," "The Mother of God," "Never give all the Heart," "The New Faces," "No Second Troy," "A Prayer for my Daughter," "A Prayer for Old Age," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Scholars," The Second Coming," "The Secret Rose," "September 1913," "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," "The Sorrow of Love," "The Spur," "The Tower," "Two Songs from a Play," "Under Ben Bulben," "What then?" "When You are Old," "The Wild Swans at Coole"

New Zealander (1):

• Ruth Gilbert (1917-): "And There shall be No More Death," "By Bread Alone," "The French Horn," "In Old Age," "Lot's Wife," "Still-born"

Welsh (1):

• Dylan Thomas (1914-1953): "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred," "And death shall have no dominion," "Do not go gentle into that good night," "Fern Hill," "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," "The hand that signed the paper," "In my craft or sullen art," "Light breaks where no sun shines," "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," "Shall gods be said to thump the clouds," "Twenty-four years," "When all my five and country senses see"

More Poems by RPO Poets.
See Molly Peacock.

Activities.
• 2012 is the centenary of the publication of Representative Poetry by the University of Toronto Press in 1912. To celebrate, we will be enhancing RPO in many ways. The RPO Advisory Board, which meets every year in December, has advanced a proposal on software development, and $25,800 has been transferred to the Library to fund the new RPO interface and tools. Sian Meikle, Toronto's premier digital librarian, will supervise this project at Robarts Library.
• Courtesy of Al Moritz and Molly Peacock, RPO now has an informal relationship with the Griffin Trust. Readers can expect more Canadian poets on RPO.
• In 2010 RPO was awarded a star-rating on Schoolzone's Webguide by its expert teacher review panel (email of Rachel Preen, October 5). The Webguide has a readership of over 60,000 active registered users and 25,000 unique users every day.
• RPO has a new, loyal, hard-working volunteer: Cameron La Follette writes, "I love going to RPO and asking for a Random Short Poem -- I could use that feature all day, and not get anything else done." She alerted us to the poems of Hazel Hall (a fine Oregon poet) and Robert Graves and made a preliminary selection of both (as she did before for our pages on Ruth Gilbert and John Masefield, which we owe to Cameron). Cameron lives in Salem, about an hour and a half north of Eugene, Oregon, and works for Oregon Coast Alliance (ORCA), engaged in land-use activism to protect the Oregon coast. Her undergraduate degree was in journalism, and she has a Masters in psychology, and a law degree. She founded and runs the Classic Poetry Group in Salem and describes herself as "a traditional poet ... oriented towards ... traditional [non-modern] poetry." Cameron writes, "I would love to help RPO in any way that strengthens, deepens and broadens the presence of traditional poetry." Because Cameron is very keen on helping us increase our selection of Australian poets, we will be working with her to add more of them to RPO.
• RPO has several new associate editors. The RPO Associate Editor in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century poetry, Emeritus Professor John Baird (Toronto), has replaced the edition of James Thomson's "Ode on Solitude" with a text that was certainly composed by Thomson himself--the previous version was based on a posthumous edition that modern editors suspect reflects the taste and fancy of the poet's literary executor. The former partial text of Joseph Warton's "The Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature" has been replaced by a full text of the revised version of 1748, together with notes that indicate the nature of the revisions and include passages omitted in the later version.
  Dr. Kathleen Cawsey, a Chaucerian in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, has joined RPO as associate editor of medieval poetry.
  Dr. Christopher Matusiak, a Renaissance drama historian now teaching at Ithaca College, takes charge of our Renaissance dramatic poetry selections.
• Dr. Marc Plamondon, our Associate Editor for Victorian poetry at Nipissing University, gave a scholarly paper, "The Lemma and Database Design: Redesigning Representative Poetry Online, Lemmatizing Lexicons of Early Modern English, and Envisioning the Lemmatic Web," in October 2009 for the INKE project at the University of Victoria.
• RPO thanks its assistants Ana Berdinskikh, who added many poets to RPO from May to August 2009; Sarah Greene, who collected post-19th-century popular lyrics for inclusion in RPO, poets including Bogan, Dacre, Ford, Judge, Scriven, Bessie Smith, and Titherage -- they represent a tradition of song lyrics that has been largely neglected by academe; and Shannon Robinson, RPO copyright officer, who negotiated permissions for poets such as Atwood, Betjeman, Bishop, Brodsky, Dafoe, Dylan Thomas, Loy, and Stevie Smith.
• The Modern Language Association of America has just brought out Ian Lancashire's Online Teaching in Language and Literature, a collection of essays by various hands to which he contributed an essay on "The Open Source Teacher" (which largely treated RPO).
• New College Library has agreed to accept the RPO book library that Ian Lancashire has collected over the years. The new College Librarian, Jeff Newman, has joined the RPO Advisory Board.

June 2007 (Version 3.0.4)

New Poets (14).
American (4): Ai, "Two Brothers" (commentary only); Wystan Hugh Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts" (commentary only); Carolyn Forché, "The Memory of Elena" (commentary only); Florence K. Frank (4)

Welsh (1): Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death" (commentary only);

Canadian (4): E. D. Blodgett (12), Sonnet L'Abbé (9), Raymond Souster (16), R. S. Weir (2)

English (1): William Cecil (1)

West Indies (1): Derek Walcott, "Frederiksted, Dusk" (commentary only)

Irish (3): Seamus Heaney, "Punishment" (commentary only); Rosemarie Rowley (10), W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children" (commentary only)

More Poems (13) by RPO Poets. G. K. Chettur, "The Triumph of Love"; S. T. Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp" and "The Nightingale"; John Donne, "A Hymne to Christ"; Gabriel Harvey, "A Charm for a Mad Woman"; George Herbert, "Redemption"; G. M. Hopkins, "Hurrahing in Harvest" and "To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life"; George Peele, "A Farewell"; Alexander Pope, "The Iliad, Book XII"; Christina Rossetti, "After Communion," "An End", and "Song."

Support. Marc Plamondon converted the timeline from an HTML file into a database. RPO moved to a TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) server at the University of Toronto Library, acquired its own URL rpo.library.utoronto.ca, was licensed by the Poetry Foundation (Chicago), and received the EDSITEment Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Trust for the Humanities, the MarcoPolo Program, and the Verizon Foundation.

December 2004 (Version 3.0.3)

New Poets (50).
American (26): Bowen (A. P.), Crapsey (Adelaide), Crosby (Ernest Howard), Dolliver (Clara G.), Finch (Annie), Franklin (Benjamin), Freneau (Philip Morin), Guiney (Louise Imogen), Guiterman (Arthur), Hovey (Richard), Lanier (Sidney), McCreery (John Luckey), Moore (Julia), Morris (George Phillips), Ortiz (Simon Joseph), Patten (George Washington), Peacock (Molly), Perkins Gilman (Charlotte Anna), Piatt (Sarah Morgan Bryan), Pierpont (John), Rankin (Jeremiah Eames), Taylor (Edward), Teasdale (Sara), Thoreau (Henry David), Whitney (Adeline Dutton Train), Wylie (Elinor)

Australian (4): Cambridge (Ada), Ogilvie (Will H.), Skeyhill (Tom), Stephens (James Brunton)

Canadian (6): Clarke (George Elliott), Crosbie (Lynn), Goldsmith (Oliver), Moritz (Albert Frank), Reibetanz (John), Sullivan (Rosemary)

English (13): Ball (J. E.), Brown (Tom), Dolben (Digby Mackworth), Duncombe (John), Fanshawe (Catherine Maria), Garnett (Richard), Graves (Alfred Perceval), Gray (John Henry), Monro (Harold), Oldys (William), Reynolds (Quentin James), Turner (Charles Tennyson), Webb (Mary)

Irish (1): French (Percy)

More Poems by RPO Poets. "A Taking Girl," "Corallina," "Fifth Villain," "He that doth Wend her," and "The Rabbit" (all Anonymous).

Corrections. My thanks to these RPO readers for their sharp eyes: Mike Eccles, Charlene Felix, Lorraine Kerr, Nick McGhee, Sara Meyer, Arlene Nicholas, J. Parmitage, and Peter Seary.

Support. Two undergraduate students in English studies at Toronto, Cheryl Cabellero and Eliza Radovici, helped me from late winter to August 2004 at the TAPoR laboratory on the 7th floor of the Robarts Library to edit works by fifty new poets. My sincere thanks to them for their enthusiastic support and to Pekka Sinervo, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Science, for a grant that made our efforts possible. Special thanks to my colleagues at the M.A. Program in Creative Writing at Toronto, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Crosbie, Albert Frank Moritz, Simon Joseph Ortiz, John Reibetanz, and Rosemary Sullivan, who allowed me to publish a generous selection of their poems. Bless Molly Peacock and Annie Finch for good-heartedly allowing me their poetry for RPO.

October 2003 (Version 3.0.2)

New Poets (18).
American (10): Joseph Warren Beach, Aline Kilmer, Don Marquis, Franklin Pierce Adams, Gamaliel Bradford, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret E. Sangster, George Santayana, Edgar Lee Masters

Canadian (1): Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

English (6): John Byrne Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), Humfrey Gifford, Robert Bridges, Reginald Heber, Dollie Radford, Isabella Whitney

Scottish (1): William Knox

More Poems by RPO Poets. "Consolation" (suggested by Mary McKercher) and "Windy Nights" by Robert Louis Stevenson; "What's the Good?"; "To Stretcher Bearers," "Missing -- Believed Killed," "Woodbine Willy," and "Indifference" by G. A. Studdert Kennedy; "The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne" by Gelett Burgess; William Blake's "A Divine Image," "A Poison Tree," "Infant Sorrow," and "The Garden of Love"; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day is Done"; James Whitcomb Riley's "Wet-weather Talk"; and Francis Ledwidge's "June" (suggested by John Geary)

Corrections. My sincere thanks to these RPO readers for their sharp eyes: Martin DeMello, Dave Dewar, James Fulford, Allan Harmsworth, Phillip Herringer, Katherine Iskrant, Malcolm McMillan, John Neal, William Leslie Overal, and Deborah Seabrook.

December 2002 (Version 3.0.1)

New Poets (20).

American (4): William Herbert Carruth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Boyle O'Reilly, John Banister Tabb

British Honduras (1): J. S. Martinez

Canadian (3): Phyllis Gotlieb, David Mills, Constance Woodrow

English (11): Anne Askew, Shirley Brooks, Charles I, Thomas William Hodgson Crosland, Charles Dickens, Francis Grose, John Frederick William Herschel, Henrietta Anne Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, Sydney Smith

Irish (1): Katharine Hinkson

Scottish (1): William McGonagall

October 2002 (Version 3.0)

New Database Structure. Poet pages and poems, author, title, first-line, and last-line indexes, and searching are now managed by a database management system linked by Cold Fusion to the Web. The programmer is Dr. Marc Plamondon. Database content is devised by Ian Lancashire. Sian Meikle, assisted by Alan Darnell and Lancashire, supervised the 18-month programming work. Katrine Raymond and Christopher Jennings, respectively, helped add data on the poets and transfer poems from HTML format to database form. Sian Meikle, Marc Lalonde, and Marc Plamondon redesigned the RPO Web page. The University of Toronto Provost's Office, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Department of English financed this extensive redesign and conversion.

New Features. During conversion, Dr. Plamondon added the last-line index, randomized selection of poems and poet, and concordance-output searches, among many other tools that ensure accuracy and ease the editing and revising process.

Commentaries. Ian Lancashire has added critical commentaries on many "touchstone" poems for educators, students, and the general reader. A list of these commentaries, which appear at the end of a poem, is in the "Criticism" index.

New Poets (1).

American (2): Mary Elizabeth Frye, John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Scottish (1): William Miller.

More Poems by RPO Poets. the rest of John Milton's Paradise Lost and his Paradise Regained.

More Anonymous Poems. "Al Nist by the Rose," "Barbara Allan," "Bonnie James Campbell," "The Douglas Tragedy," "Edward," "Erthe tToc of Erthe," "Get Up and Bar the Door," "Her I was and Her I Drank," "I Have a Gentil Cook," "In Sing of a Maiden," "Ich Am of Irlaunde," "If Man him Bethocte," "In the Garden of Eden lay Adam," "In Woman is Rest, Peac, and Pacience," "Lenten is Gone with Loue to Toune," "Lord Randall," "Maiden in the Mor Lay," "Make we Mery bothe More and Lasse," "Mary Hamilton," "May no Man Slepe in your Halle," "My Lefe ys Faren in a Lond," "Nou Goth Sonne under Wode," "O Death, O Death, Rock me Asleep," "Say me, Viit in the Brom," "Spende, and Gode schal Sende," "Stay with me, God," "Summe Men Sayon that Y am Blac," "Swarte Smekyd Smethes," "Thirti Dayes hath Nouember," "Thys Boke ys On," "Whanne Ich Thenche Thinges Thre," and "The Wife of Usher's Well."

Corrections. My sincere thanks to RPO readers Todd Ames and Eric Nye for giving me notice of errors, to James Fulford for kindly identifying the Browning quotation that James Kenneth Stephen used as an epigraph in "To R. K.," and to Kieran McIntyre for information about William Allingham's grave.

January 2002 (Version 2.11)

New Poets (3).

British (2): Robert Stephen Hawker, Gilbert White

Anglo-Indian (1): Rabindranath Tagore

More Poems by RPO Poets. Additional Mother Goose rhymes from Tommy Thumb's Song Book (1788); epitaphs -- "Adieu Vain World I've Seen Enough of Thee," and "As I was so be Yee" and "My Friend Judge not Me" from William Camden's Remaines (1605); and the anonymous "The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women."

October-December 2001 (Version 2.10)

New Poets (32).

American (3): Emma Lazarus, William Vaughn Moody, Woodrow Wilson

Anglo-Indian (7): Govinda Krishna Chettur, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Toru Dutt, Kasiprasad Ghose, "Laurence Hope" (Adela Florence Nicolson Cory), Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall.

Australian (1): George Essex Evans

British (19): John Askham, the Balioll masquers (H. C. Beeching, J. A. Hamilton, J. W. Mackail, P. E. Matheson, J. B. B. Nichols, L. F. Smith, and C. A. Spring-Rice), Arthur Christopher Benson, "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans), Robert Fuller Murray, Isa Craig Knox, Stanley de Vere Alexander Julius, Andrew Lang, Francis Ledwidge, Henry Francis Lyte, James Clerk Maxwell, James Montgomery, Ernest Myers, Walter Alexander Raleigh, Elizabeth Siddal, Joseph Skipsey, James Joseph Sylvester, Anna Letitia Waring, Augusta (Davies) Webster

Canadian (1): Alexander MacGregor Rose

Singapore (1): Gilbert E. Brooke

More Poems by RPO Poets. Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" and "When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly."

Editorial Apparatus. RPO now has a selected bibliography with links to other major (mainly institutional) on-line poetry collections. The search engine has been upgraded, courtesy of Marc Lalonde and Sian Meikle.

Corrections. My sincere thanks to these RPO readers for giving me notice of errors: Rex Agacy, Paul Annis, F. S. Bill, Peter Cavell, Olivia Dickinson, Lily Driskill, Christa Hammerschmidt, Jonathan Harvey, Dave Hunt, Vance Maverick, Nancy Mayer, Alexis Namdar, Susan Noll, Nigel Powis, Rachel Reed, Dave Rogers, Andrea W. Sexton, John and Marg Simpson, and Dave Swinehart. My New College colleague Chandler Davis kindly alerted me to James Joseph Sylvester, the 19th-century mathematician-poet.

March 4, 2001 (Version 2.09)

New Poets (9).

British (6): Henry Carey, Thomas Carlyle, William Cosmo Monkhouse, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, William J. Macquorn Rankine, John Todhunter. Thanks to Patricia Reeser for drawing Carlyle's "To-day" to my attention.

New Zealand (1): David McKee Wright.

Australian (2): Barron Field, Henry Lawson.

Anonymous (7): As I Walked Out in the Streets of Laredo, Down in the Valley, The Hearse Song, Midnight Special, Occidit Miserum Crambe Repetita Pupillum, The Red River Valley, She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain.

More Poems by RPO Poets. Thanks to Howard Roberts for supplying an additional version of "Knees up" and an account of how it was sung, to Professor F. C. Putnam for requesting that missing parts of "Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt" be supplied, and to Erica for telling me about Charles' Kingsley's "A Farewell." A few pieces not already supplied from the 1912 edition of Representative Poetry have been added: excerpts from Sir Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion", from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan", and William Morris's "The Earthly Paradise"; Matthew Arnold's "The Better Part." Lastly, a second version of "Mademoiselle from Armentières."

Editorial Apparatus. A history of Representative Poetry, Web pages for each of the contributing editors since 1912, and fully-linked table-of-content pages for the 1912 and 1962-63 print-editions. (My thanks to Amanda Wagner and other members of the Digital Studio for help with image files, and to Hugh MacCallum, Peter Morgan, Donald Theall, and Milton Wilson.) W. J. Alexander's notes for Tennyson's In Memoriam. Thanks to André le Roux (Reference section, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town) for additional biographical information about RPO South African poets.

Corrections. My thanks to the following readers who have drawn to my attention errors in RPO files: Susan Noll ("wabe" for "wade" in "Jabberwocky," line 2), Larry Hammick for problems with links

Christmas, 2000 (Version 2.08)

New Poets (14).

American (3): Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (my thanks to Don Foster and Mary Van Deusen for this discovery), and Mark Doty and Marge Piercy, who are the first living poets to contribute to RPO (my sincere thanks to both of them).

British (2): Robert Dodsley, Henry VI.

New Zealand (1): Katherine Mansfield.

Rhodesian (1): Kingsley Fairbridge.

South African (7): Alice Mary Buckton, Thomas Craig, Perceval Gibbon, William Hamilton, Edith L. M. King, Thomas Pringle, Francis Ernley Walrond.

More Poems by RPO Poets. "Old Santeclaus," which Don Foster attributes to Clement Clarke Moore.

Revisions. Hundreds of poem-files using the 1994 RPO design (for example, it linked to a separate bibliography file) are now updated to the current design. Notes have been added for most of these.

Corrections. Don Foster's attribution of "An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" to Major Henry Livingston, Jr., has caused me to remove the poem from the works of Clement Clarke Moore.

My thanks to the following readers who have drawn to my attention errors in RPO files: Lindy Ader (T. S. Eliot's separation from his first wife), Anthony Ford, Sean Mooney, Dave Rogers, and Leigh Trahan (flawed links), Adam Horovitz (a misspelling in the timeline), Anniina Jokinen ("in" for "it" in Surrey's "Give place, ye lovers," line 2), Alexis Namdar ("smile" for "simile" in line 13 of e. e. cummings' "`kitty'"), Anthony Ford ("briny" for "bring" in line 34 of "The Walrus and the Carpenter"), Rachel Reed ("shoes" for "shows" in line 63 of the same poem), Jim Mahony ("misty" for "misy" in line 41 of Mary Leapor's "Epistle to a Lady"; and "flues" for "fluies" in line 13 of Owen's "Strange Meeting"), and Robert Schofield ("spark" for "sharp" in Ambrose Bierce's "Alone," line 2). I would also like to thank Charlie Hughes of Wind Publications for suggesting improvements in the FAQ page.

May 10, 2000

New Poets (10).

American: Phoebe Cary, Lydia Maria Child, Edmund Vance Cooke, e. e. cummings, Sarah Josepha Hale, Celia Thaxter, Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

British: Francis William Bourdillon, D. H. Lawrence, William Brighty Rands.

More Poems by RPO Poets. Edgar Guest selection, expanded to include "Home," "It Couldn't Be Done," "Only a Dad," and "The Lay for the Troubled Golfer."

Indexes and Editorial Apparatus. The timeline has expanded considerably in events of the last century. The glossary of poetic terms now has a preliminary headword index and has been revised and extended.

Corrections. My thanks to Allen Forsyth for pointing out a wrong date in the biography of Gellet Burgess.

February 5, 2000

New Poets (5).

American: Louise Bogan, Hilda Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams.

British: Charles Lamb

More Poems by RPO Poets. Rupert Brooke selection, expanded to include "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," "Heaven," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Sonnet Reversed"; Edward Thomas selection, expanded to include "Adlestrop," "October," and "Snow." Alexander Pope selection, expanded to include "Solitude: An Ode" and "You Know Where You did Despise." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow selection, expanded to include "Excelsior," "The Children's Hour," "The Ladder of St. Augustine," and "There was a Little Girl." Thanks to Norma Bliss for suggesting "Adlestrop" and to Ameeta Palav for "Ode to Solitude."

Editorial Apparatus . The introduction and questions-and-answers file have been updated. A suggested cast-list is added for T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

January 10, 2000

New Poets (20).

American (6): Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Eugene O'Neill, Dorothy Parker, John Payne, and Henry Van Dyke.

British (8): William Allingham, John Bunyan, James Elroy Flecker, Hartley Coleridge, Mary Howitt, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Philips, and J. M. Synge.

Canadian (6): A. H. Reginald Buller, Anne Hecht, Rosanna Eleanor (Mullins) Leprohon, James McIntyre, Susanna Moodie, and John Arthur Phillips. I would like to acknowledge warmly the help of Katrine Raymond for her assistance in editing the poems of Susanna Moodie.

Large New Poems. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius"; John Philips' "Cider."

More Poems by RPO Poets. John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613," George Herbert's "Easter Wings," Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Dies Irae," Sir Philip Sidney's "You Gote-heard Gods," and Alfred lord Tennyson's "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." New anonymous poems are "Soldiers who wish to be a hero," "The Fight at Montgomery's," "Madrigal (My Love in her Attire)," "Trifles," "Frankie and Johnnie," and a dozen classical limericks. Finally, the selection of Algernon Charles Swinburne has been re-edited and doubled in number to 36 poems.

Indexes. Two new indexes have been added: a glossary of poetic terms, and a year's days of poems and poets (or calendar).

Corrections. My thanks to the following readers for reporting typos or erroneous readings in the texts of the poems: Tim Sadenwasser (for "closer to her lips" in Keats' "Hyperion," line 14), Robert Schofield (for "spark" instead of "sharp" in Ambrose Bierce's "Alone"), Brian Sheppard (for "covet" in line 19 of Clough's "The Latest Decalogue"), and Willard (for "laugh as" in line 12 of Shelley's "The Cloud").

For notices of bad links, thanks to Eric Blomquist, Sid Harrison, Hugh Knox, Martin Wickham, John K. Taber, and Maren Wolter. Peter and Christine from Austria corrected the rhyme scheme for Keats' "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," and Pat Carmichael did likewise for Frost's "Stopping by Woods." Bobbie Gallup and Sharron Manassa corrected glosses for Riley's "Raggedy Man" and "Orphant Annie." Larry A. Stevens pointed out Vachel Lindsay's manner of death. Joy Mills caught the typo "mad" in the entry for Rowe under 1715 of the timeline.

November 12, 1998

New Poets (44).

American (25): David Bates, Katharine Lee Bates, Gelett Burgess, Stephen Crane, Thomas Stearns Eliot (British from 1927), Daniel Decatur Emmett, Stephen C. Foster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Moses Horton, Francis Scott Key, Benjamin Franklin King, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Lowry, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Ezra Loomis Pound, James Whitcomb Riley, Edmund Hamilton Sears, Arabella Eugenia Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins, Phillis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, and Henry Clay Work.

British (12): Bede, Cædmon, Charles Stuart Calverley, Julian Grenfell, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Clement Hilton, Frederick Locker Lampson, Edward Lear, "Mother Goose," John Newton, William Roscoe, and Charles Hamilton Sorley.

Canadian (7): Raymond Knister, Stephen Leacock, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Marjorie Pickthall, Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Frederick George Scott.

Large New Poems. New transcriptions are included for three of the four great poems of British Library Cotton Nero A.x (ca.1375?-1400?) by the so-called Gawain Poet: Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tennyson's In Memoriam now appears in full.

More Poems by RPO Poets. Anonymous ("The Bells of Hell," "I Don't Want to Die," "Knees up, Mother Brown," "Mademoiselle from Armentières," "Roll Me Over," "Times is Hard," and "There is a Tavern in the Town"), Robert Burns ("Comin Thro' the Rye," "A Red, Red Rose"), Lewis Carroll ("A Boat beneath a sunny sky," "How doth the little crocodile," "Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," "Speak roughly to your little boy," "Jabberwocky," "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!" and "`You are old, father William,' the young man said"), and John Keats ("If by Dull Rhymes our English must be Chain'd"). I am grateful to Anthony Hopkins (York University, Toronto) for allowing me to draw from his Songs from the Front & Rear: Canadian Servicemen's Songs of the Second World War (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1979).

Prose on Poetry. The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in three books, attributed to George Puttenham, has been added.

Indexes. The chronological index has been revised and much extended. It now comprises two sub-indexes: (a) a listing of poets (and their poems in RPO) by their birth date; and a new timeline for all English poetry, whether in this collection or not, from Old English through to 1998. The first-line index, which had fallen behind recent additions, has been brought up to date.

Corrections. Thanks to Vance Maverick for "Tintern Abbey" (wordswor3.html), line 32, "As have no slight or trivial influence", for "indebtedness" (herbert.html), for a misattached note to line 37 in "Atalanta in Calydon" (swinburn1.html), and for "Beauteous" in the title to Wordsworth's sonnet (wordswor16.html); to Judy Gibson for "Robert Southey" (not "Southley") in this file; to Bob Fisher, for pointing out the erronious title for Milton's "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs" (Sonnets XII); and to J.M. Zezulka, for locating Archibald Lampman's birthplace more precisely.

April 7, 1998

New Poets (3). New are the American poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Trumbull Stickney. Special thanks to Edwin Ahearn of Brooklyn, New York, for suggesting Robinson and Stickney, and to Hortensia de los Santos for regreting the omission of Longfellow.

Corrections. Thanks to Bill Royds for noting a damaged link to Archibald Lampman's "Midnight" (lamp5c.html), to Eliot for problems with links in the titles index, and especially to Edwin Ahearn, not only for catching several errors -- "Railroad Children" for "Railway Children" in the biographical notes on Edith Nesbit, and "yot" for "yet" in Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment," line 27 -- but for two engaging letters on poetry, poets, and editing.

January 29, 1998

New Poets (35) and Poems (236) for Version 2.03. All poems in the first (1912) and second (1916) editions of Representative Poetry that were not carried forward into the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s editions have been now added, with their notes. These increase the number of anonymous poems as well as works by Arnold, Browning, Burns, Byron, Collins, Gray, Morris, Peerson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Scott, Shakespeare, Shenston, Tennyson, Wilmot, and Wordsworth.

The new poets are Sarah Flower Adams, Cecil Frances Alexander, Anna Lætetia Barbauld, Ambrose Bierce, William Wilfred Campbell, Bliss Carman, William Johnson Cory, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, John Davidson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Sarah Fyge (Egerton), Sabine Baring-Gould, Edgar Albert Guest, Caroline Hayward, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Ernest Hulme, Helen Hunt Jackson, Joyce Kilmer, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Leapor, Amy Levy, Evan MacColl, Clement Clarke Moore, Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, Edith Nesbit, John Henry Newman, Carl Sandburg, Alan Seeger, James Kenneth Stephen, Ernest Lawrence Thayer, Augustus Montague Toplady, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Annie Louisa Walker, and Isaac Watts. Eighteen of these poets come from Canada and the United States (two of these represent black poets: Dunbar and Moorer). Fourteen are women. New notes are provided for all poems and poets.

Sincere thanks to my administrative assistant from late October to early January, Melinda Robinson, to the co-op program at Turner Fenton School in Brampton, to Joan Elchuk, Melinda's teacher, and to my chairman Brian Corman; to John Garwood for suggesting we add Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"; and to Paul L. Wolf for alerting me to Helen Hunt Jackson's verse.

Corrections. Thanks to Vance Maverick (once more) for correcting "king'" to "king's" in Beddoes' "Old Adam," line 14 (beddoes2b.html); to Harlan Bjornstad for detecting "childern" for "children" in Landor's "The Maid's Lament," line 23 (landor11.html); to Abramo Weber for pointing out that links in Coleridge's poet page to the chapters in Biographia Literaria needed fixing; to Rob Hale for correcting the rhyme scheme note in Wyatt's "Long Love" (wyatt1.html); and to Peter Friesen for spotting "serere" for "serene" in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (wordswor3.html).

November 3, 1997

Corrections. Lines in the notes on the life and works of Anne Bradstreet were accidentally cropped, an error now put right. The following typographical mistakes are now corrected: arnold1.html (line 59n, for "love" read "lose"); herbert4b.html (line 13, for "forgeited" read "forfeited"); keats18.html (the rhyme scheme should read "ababcdecde"), wordswor3.html (line 32, for "have" read "have no"; line 41, for "serere" read "serene"). Sincere thanks to Colin Hanley, Al Magary, and once again Vance Maverick.

May 21, 1997

New Poets (2) and Poems (30) for Version 2.02. Emily Dickinson (USA) and Edgar Allan Poe (8).

Notes on Poetry. The rest of the notes from the third edition of Representative Poetry--covering poems by 33 further poets (from Jonathan Swift to Algernon Charles Swinburne)--are now included at the bottom of the poem files. Notes now exist for over 70 poets in the collection. Clicking on a highlighted line number moves one from the text-line to the note on that line.

Large New Poems. There are two additions. The 1798 edition of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads may now be accessed from their respective author files. Pauline Johnson's collected poems, Flint and Feather (1912), is now also available from her author page.

Reformatting. All poems by authors in the third edition have been reformatted at the time the notes were added. Bibliographical references are now placed in the poem file rather than in a separate bibliography file. Many small corrections were made to the encoding at this time, and several to the texts themselves. A number of poems--particularly excerpts--were renumbered so as to reflect the numeration in the complete texts.

Corrections. Faulty anchor tags preventing access to files are now corrected in author files for Richard Carew of Anthony, Sir William Davenant, John Dennis, A. E. Housman, and Henry King. Thanks to Ilse Hirvonen and Elliot Wheeler for alerting me to these problems.

April 15, 1997

New Poets (9) and Poems (87) for Version 2.01. Anne Bradstreet (USA), Dr. D. Cooper (England), Isabella Valancy Crawford (Canada), William Henry Drummond (Canada), Eugene Field (USA), Henry VIII (England), Joseph Howe (Canada), Archibald Lampman (Canada), and Chidiock Tichborne (England).

Revised Poets. All poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt have been re-edited and annotated with full notes. Six new poems are added, to bring the total to 23.

Notes on Poetry. Notes from the third edition of Representative Poetry are now included at the bottom of the poem files for 34 poets in that edition, from Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, to Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea. Clicking on a highlighted line number moves one from the text to the note on that line.

August 31, 1996

New Poets for Version 2.0 (22). Mary Barber, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Jane Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Eliza Cook, Henry Austin Dobson, William Ernest Henley, E. Pauline Johnson, Alice Meynell, Mary Monck, Amelia Opie, Katherine Philips, Adelaide A. Procter, Mary Robinson, Robert W. Service, Charlotte Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor, Francis Thompson, Oscar Wilde.

Large New Poems. The Hengwrt transcription of the "General Prologue" and the fabliaux of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"; the entire first book of Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (the story of the Red Crosse Knight); Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol".

Poets Added from the 2nd edition (100). Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, Richard Harris Barham, William Barnes, Richard Barnfield, James Beattie, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Aphra Behn, Robert Blair, William Lisle Bowles, Nicholas Breton, Thomas Edward Brown, William Browne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Butler, William Byrd, Thomas Campbell, George Canning, George Chapman, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Churchill, John Cleveland, Richard Corbet, Abraham Cowley, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Dekker, Sir John Denham, Sydney Dobell, Gavin Douglas, John Dowland, William Drummond, William Dunbar, Owen Felltham, Robert Fergusson, Giles Fletcher, Phineas Fletcher, Thomas Ford, J. H. Frere, George Gascoigne, Orlando Gibbons, John Gower, James Graham marquis of Montrose, William Gray of Reading, Fulke Greville lord Brooke, William Habington, Joseph Hall, Stephen Hawes, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Robert Henryson, Edward Herbert lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hoccleve, Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, James I of Scotland, Henry King, Charles Kingsley, William Langland, Thomas Lodge, John Lydgate, Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Macpherson, John Marston, William Mickle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Morley, John Oldham, Thomas Parnell, Coventry Patmore, Thomas Love Peacock, Martin Peerson, Walter Porter, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Matthew Prior, Francis Quarles, Allan Ramsay, William Shenstone, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, James Shirley, John Skelton, Robert Southey, Robert Southwell, William Strode, Joshua Sylvester, and James Thomson (1834-1882). Thomas Tickell, Thomas lord Vaux, Edmund Waller, William Warner, Thomas Warton Jr., Joseph Warton, John Webster, Thomas Weelkes, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, Joseph Blanco White, John Wilbye, George Wither, Charles Wolfe, Sir Henry Wotton, Edward Young.

Prose on Poetry. A new series of 18 prose essays and treatises on subjects related to poetry, based on original editions: Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesie (1595), Richard Carew of Anthony "The Excellency of the English Tongue" (printed 1614), Ben Jonson's Timber (1640), Sir William Davenant's "Preface to Gondibert" (1651/1673), John Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesie (1668), Thomas Sprat's "An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley" (1668), John Dennis' The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Alexander Pope's "Preface to his Translation of Homer's Iliad" (1715), Edward Young's "Conjectures on Original Composition" (1759), Samuel Johnson's "Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare's Plays" (1765), "Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Vol. I (1817), Thomas Love Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" (1821), Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1865), and Walter Pater's essays on "Coleridge" (1865/1880), "Wordsworth" (1874), and "Style" (1888) from Appreciations.

A questions-and-answers page. This attempts to respond to questions we receive from time to time.

Changes. New navigation pointers; re-alphabetized lists and indexes -- lines beginning with "a," "an," and "the" are now sorted by the second word; redesigned opening screens for author and index files.

Corrections to texts (4 files): arnold21.html ("Dover Beach," 31: be read lie), brooke2.html ("Safety," title: II. read I.), tennyson11.html ("Locksley Hall," 130: tape read lapt), and scott2.html ("Marmion," 1112: Goss read Cross).

Sincere thanks to my student Daniel Kim for several months of volunteer assistance in proofreading and encoding the additional poems from the second edition, and to Web readers Jonathan Daniels, Peter Friesen, John Hill, Ilse Hirvonen, Matthew Seal, Ken Smith, Steven T. Smith, and Karl Zinn for corrections to the text.

August 2, 1995

New Poets (9). Rupert Brooke, Lewis Carroll, Ernest Dowson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Dr. John McCrae, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Edward Thomas.

New Commentary. H. Kerpneck's notes to poems by Arnold and Meredith from Representative Poetry, vol. III, Third Edition (1963): 419-22, 425.

Other Additions. This file.

Changes. New navigation icons, and revised directory structure (all files); indexes to dates, first lines, and titles subdivided into smaller units and revised.

Corrections (64 files). 1eliz1.html, 1eliz3.html, 1eliz4.html, arnold13.html, arnold17.html, blake36.html, browning1.html, browning8.html, browning11.html, browning13.html, burns7.html, byron4.html, byron11.html, clough2.html, clough5.html, coleridg6.html, collins1.html, crashaw9.html, donne10.html, donne16.html, donne30.html, donne31.html, dryden6.html, dryden7.html, greene1.html, herbert1.html, herbert5.html, herrick1.html, johnson1.html, lanyer1.html, marvell2.html, meredith3.html, meredith4.html, meredith5.html, meredith6.html, meredith7.html, meredith8.html, meredith9.html, meredith10.html, meredith11.html, meredith12.html, pope2.html, pope3.html, pope5.html, pope6.html, pope7.html, pope8.html, pope11.html, rossettg17.html, scott2.html, scott4.html, scott5.html, spenser2.html, spenser5.html, spenser6.html, spenser7.html, spenser8.html, spenser9.html, spenser10.html, spenser11.html, spenser12.html, traherne4.html, and wordswor11.html.

Thanks to Marc Lalonde (University of Toronto Library) and Vance Maverick (UC Berkeley) for corrections.

Comments and corrections are welcome.