Archive FAQ

Yes! Please share poems via social media, linking to our site, or printing poems for personal use. Note that our poems may be protected by copyright law and you are responsible for ascertaining fair use of our content.

The Poetry Foundation does not own the rights to most poems on our site. Please consult with the rightsholder to obtain permission to reprint any poems found in our archive.

A rightsholder is the person or organization who owns the copyright on intellectual property such as books, films, photographs, and poems. Rightsholders decide who can use their property and how they can use it. Publishers hold the rights to most poems, but sometimes other agencies or estates (such as a deceased poet’s family) hold rights. The Poetry Foundation credits publishers under each poem when available.

According to the U.S. Copyright Office, “copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression.” Copyright grants certain legal protections to the creator of an original creative work. Copyright also allows creators to sell their rights to others, who then become rightsholders themselves.

The Poetry Foundation acquires permission to reprint poems on our site. For a variety of reasons, we are not able to obtain permissions to every published poem. People work the archive, meaning poems expire and licenses are renewed based on human discretion. If we are missing a poem you expected to see, please read more in our suggestions FAQ on this page.

We reprint selected previously published work based on a variety of factors. Please contact us through the general information form with your suggestion and it will be routed to the digital archive editor. Suggestions will be read as time allows, and you will not receive a response to your suggestion unless the editor requires more information.

We are always looking to include more poets in the archive. Please contact us through the general information form and your suggestion will be routed to the digital archive editor, who evaluates suggestions as time allows.

Poems exist in many iterations and forms that change from publication to publication. For example, Walt Whitman re-published Leaves of Grass in six different print editions during his lifetime with one “deathbed edition” released after his death, making every version of those poems different. You can read more about poem versioning in this blog post. Please verify the poem’s text by consulting a print or digital copy of the publication from which our version is copied before suggesting a correction; you can find the poem’s source listed at the bottom of the poem’s page. Please submit confirmed corrections through our contact form.

The Poetry Foundation is unable to respond to individual research questions, including requests for help with citations. Please consult our web resources, including collections and articles, for information that may help answer your question. Ask your local librarian and consult other researched and verifiable online resources, such as poets.org, for further information.

You can read about the history of the magazine on our website. To read primary sources from the archives of Poetry magazine, please visit the University of Chicago Special Collections and Indiana University Lilly Library.

Poets may submit their author biography for review. Do not submit more than once per year, including revision requests. Please submit your biography via this form. Submission is not a guarantee of publication. We are unable to respond to individual requests, and your bio will be reviewed in the order received based on the capacity of our editors. All biographies are edited for house style and fact-checked to ensure accuracy. In order to maintain accuracy and reduce revisions to existing biographies, we are unable to include self-publications or forthcoming materials in biographies.

Works in the digital archive are previously published and we do not own the rights to these works; please see our permissions FAQ on this page. If you are a poet and would like to recommend previously published work for archive acquisition, please make a note as such when requesting revisions to your author biography page. Additionally, while we don’t accept submissions for publication on the website, Poetry magazine has open submission periods throughout the year. All poems that appear in the magazine also appear in the digital archive. Find instructions for submitting your poems to Poetry here.

Though we update biographies routinely, we cannot update biographies after every individual publication. Please submit revised biographies only after significant biographical revisions have been made or the biography on our website is more than five years out of date.

Please submit your idea for new archive content through our contact form. Suggestions will be routed to the digital archive editor. We encourage you to review our existing collections and poem guides for ideas.

Please note that Harriet Books does not accept unsolicited review copies. If you would like to submit a book for consideration, please see the Poetry magazine FAQ.

Please visit our Grants FAQ for information on funding from the Poetry Foundation.