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, fill out our contact form with details about the poem.

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.

Please submit your biography via this form and allow six weeks before requesting an update. Submission is not a guarantee of publication. All submissions are subject to editing for house style and fact-checking at the editor’s discretion.

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only after significant biographical revisions have been made or the biography on our website is more than five years out of date.

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. If possible, please verify the poem text by consulting a print or digital copy of the original 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 corrections through our contact form.

We reprint selected previously published work based on a variety of factors. Though we hope to have one soon, there is currently no “suggestion box” for the archive. If you like, 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 may not receive a response to your suggestion. You may submit your new work to Poetry magazine.

Yes, please submit your idea for new educational archive-based content, such as collections or poem guides, through our contact form. Suggestions will be routed to the digital archive editor to evaluate as time allows.

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.