Gather any information that you have about the poem (author, title, lines from the poem and/or any other information about the author or poem).
Use the author’s name/part of the name or poem title. For example, to find "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, you might use any of the following:
Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee
Poe
If you have only the author's name, choose a website featuring the author's poems to continue your search. Go to Step 4, if you have lines from the poem.
Combine the author's name with the poem's title. For example:
Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee
Poe Annabel Lee
To narrow further, use the keyword "poem" in combination with your primary keywords:
Poe Annabel poem
Type line(s) from the poem as keywords. Use the lines in combination with the keyword "poem" and/or the author's name. For example:
the woods are lovely dark and deep poem
Frost the woods are lovely dark and deep poem
Either keyword set should result with the title "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.
Enter biographical, period or other information as keywords in combination with author, title and/or lines.
Example 1: you have a poem line (the vorpal blade went snicker-snack), but you don't know the poem's author or title. You have an idea of when the author wrote it—a specific year or series of years such as a decade or century (the 1800s).
the vorpal blade went snicker-snack 1800s
Result: poem titled “Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll.
Example 2: you have lines from the poem (the cicada unwinding his thin green string of a bow) and you know that the author is American and a woman. You also know that the poem appeared in a book, but you have only part of the title ("if I had wheels or love"). Type any combinations of keywords based on this information:
American poet woman if I had wheels or love
poet if I had wheels or love
Result: book title "If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller."
Narrow your search based on the word "cicada" or the lines of the poem.