Finding poetry

Find poetry and verse in the Library, online and print indexes, and the Internet.

Library catalogue

Catalogue


See the heading Using the Library catalogue for searching guidelines. The catalogue lists books on Australian poetry.

You can search the  catalogue using the keywords Australian poetry, but you will get thousands of results. One way to narrow down the results is to select a theme or topic and add this to your keyword search, for example type the terms Australian poetry humour or Australian poetry war in the search box.

You can also search using the term Australian poetry under the subject option.This still gives you a lot of results, but you can  click on the suggested subject headings or years of creation  on the left of the screento narrow your search.

If you know the poet's name, you can search by author to find a book or list of books by that poet.

If you want to track down a specific poem, or need  information on Australian poetry, see the following books:

Anthologies

Browsing the Library shelves for anthologies and collections of poetry can sometimes be a good way of locating that elusive verse. Australian poetry can be found at call numbers 819.91 and A821

Some examples of these include:

"When I was at school..."

Many people remember words and lines of poems they learned at school. If the verse is not well known, it may be difficult to find in anthologies or indexes.

Possible sources of these poems are school magazines such as  the The School paper (Victorian Education Dept) or one of The Victorian readers, which were first published by the Education Department of Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century. Not all issues have indexes, so you may have to browse the issues to find the verse you want. It is best to narrow down the date to the month or year you need, if possible.

Verses by Australian authors up to about 1940 can be located on the Australian literature website Austlit. Some of the verses from The School paper have been collected in the anthologies Australian verse for children and More Australian verse for children.

The Austral garden: an anthology of Australian verse is another useful source for tracing poems studied at school.

Library catalogue subject headings

See the tab Using the Library catalogue for searching guidelines.

Examples of subject headings relating specifically to Australian poetry include the following. See the facets at left of the results list for options to narrow your search.