---
license: cc0-1.0
language:
- en
tags:
- poetry
- public-domain
- gutenberg
- literature
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
task_categories:
- text-generation
pretty_name: Poetry Greats (Public Domain)
---

# Poetry Greats

Curated, poem-level extracts from Project Gutenberg for 20 canonical English-language poets. All source texts are public domain in the US (pre-1929 publication). Intended as a reference set of "gold" examples for evaluation, few-shot prompting, and stylometric study.

## Contents

4,090 poems across 29 books and 20 poets:

| Poet | Poems |
|---|---|
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 913 |
| H. W. Longfellow | 616 |
| Christina Rossetti | 459 |
| Emily Dickinson | 446 |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | 360 |
| Walt Whitman | 282 |
| Sara Teasdale | 174 |
| Thomas Hardy | 142 |
| William Blake | 97 |
| W. B. Yeats | 94 |
| Edwin Arlington Robinson | 82 |
| Robert Browning | 75 |
| Gerard Manley Hopkins | 74 |
| William Wordsworth | 53 |
| Edgar Allan Poe | 49 |
| Robert Frost | 48 |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning | 45 |
| Alfred Tennyson | 32 |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | 27 |
| John Keats | 22 |

## Schema

| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `author` | string | Poet name |
| `book_title` | string | Source collection |
| `gutenberg_id` | int | Project Gutenberg book ID |
| `poem_title` | string \| null | Extracted title, or null if not inferred |
| `poem_text` | string | Poem body, preserving line breaks |
| `line_count` | int | Non-blank line count |
| `word_count` | int | Word count |

## Source books

All public domain (pre-1929 US publication). Direct links:

- Dickinson -- Poems [Series One](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2678), [Two](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2679), [Three](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12241)
- Whitman -- [Leaves of Grass](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322)
- Keats -- [Poems Published in 1820](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23684)
- Shelley -- [Complete Poetical Works](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4800)
- Blake -- [Poems of William Blake](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/574), [Songs of Innocence and of Experience](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1934)
- Wordsworth -- [Lyrical Ballads 1798](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9622)
- Coleridge -- [Complete Poetical Works](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29090)
- Tennyson -- [Maud and Other Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56913)
- Robert Browning -- [Browning's Shorter Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16376)
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- [Sonnets from the Portuguese](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2002)
- Christina Rossetti -- [Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19188), [Goblin Market and Other Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16950)
- Hopkins -- [Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22403)
- Hardy -- [Wessex Poems and Other Verses](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3167), [Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2997)
- Yeats -- [Responsibilities and Other Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36865), [In the Seven Woods](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30652), [The Green Helmet and Other Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30488)
- Frost -- [A Boy's Will](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3021), [North of Boston](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3026)
- Poe -- [Poems of Edgar Allan Poe](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76996)
- Longfellow -- [Complete Poetical Works](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1365)
- Robinson -- [The Children of the Night](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/313)
- Teasdale -- [Love Songs](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/442), [Flame and Shadow](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/591)
- Millay -- [Renascence and Other Poems](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/109)

## Parsing notes

Poems were extracted by a heuristic parser that splits each book on triple blank lines, drops Gutenberg front/back matter, and filters each block through a verse-detector (median line length < 60 chars, max < 120, low run-on rate). Some long sequences -- especially Coleridge's *Complete Poetical Works* and Longfellow's *Complete Poetical Works* -- include fragments, variants, and short juvenilia in addition to canonical works. Titles are extracted when the first line of a block looks title-like; otherwise the `poem_title` field is null.

## License

[CC0 1.0 Universal](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) -- all source texts are public domain. The parsing and curation are also released under CC0.

## Citation

Source texts courtesy of [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/). Parsing and curation by Yoonho Lee.