English Literature

Edited by Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Students and faculty studying poetry-whether individual lines or the context that produced them-will find this encyclopedia a tremendous help for its detailed entries, both on technical terms (e.g. alliteration or trochee), poetic forms (e.g. the sonnet or villanelle), literary periods (e.g. Modernism), national literatures (e.g. Polish Poetry), and types of literary criticism (e.g. Structuralism).

By Ian Hamilton.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
In this comprehensive guide to modern poetry in English, established poets express opinions on such peers as Ted Hughes (by Tom Paulin), Robert Lowell (by Seamus Heaney) and Sylvia Plath (by Anne Stevenson). The guide includes information on roughly 1,500 poets, from W.H. Auden to Benjamin Zephaniah, and hailing from a range of places such as America, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Trinidad and Zimbabwe. Besides providing commentary on poets and their work, this guide also contains entries on magazines, movements, and critical terms.

Edited by Edith P. Hazen.
NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Ever wondered who wrote . . . "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying"? This one-volume-wonder has a first-line index that will tell you. Dealing chiefly with English-language poems printed in anthologies, as well as some poems translated into English, the Index to Poetry provides a first-line and title index, along with author and subject indexes for 75,000 poems by 11,000 authors appearing in 379 anthologies and organized into 4,000 subjects. In addition, the source includes a last-line index-included in the title and first-line section-for 10,000 of the more frequently anthologized poems.