Researching Poetry

Doing college level research and writing is one of the objectives of this course. Why not do it with poetry?

But how?!

First, it's helpful to look at the age of the poem and the context. Poems that have been around for a while in the public and academic consciousness will most certainly have been the subject of literary criticism or academic research. The way to find almost ANYTHING credible written about a literary topic is to explore the MLA International bibliography. You can find a link to this bibliography on the Goshen College Good Library web page.

There are several ways to find the MLA International Bibliography. (MLA stands for the Modern Language Association. This database indexes articles on literature written on ALL modern language literatures.)

1) Go under "Books and Articles" heading and click on A-Z Databases. You will find it alphabetically under "ML." Note: Do not click on the MLA List of Periodicals. That is a different database.

2) Go to EBSCO (listed on the left hand side of the page) and log in. Then look for the MLA International Bibliography.

Searching: Try several different searches before you give up. When I was looking up W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939," I found different results for "W H Auden" and "September 1, 1939" than I did for "Auden" and "September 1, 1939." Which search terms do you think offered more results?

Depending on how many items you get, you may want to narrow further.

Don't simply go for the full text articles. Look over the range of "hits" you got in your search. Notice the subjects and types of things written about. If there's an article you really want and it's not available in full text, you can order it through interlibrary loan with a few clicks. Most articles will come free to your inbox within a week and you will be able to read and download them for a period of about 2 weeks.

The MLA bibliography does not index articles in newspapers, popular magazines, or on websites. (It does index some articles from online journals--including the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, which I edit.) If you want to find materials from the popular press, look at the Academic Search Premiere database or the Historical New York Times database (if it's in The New York Times).

Make sure to write down all the citations of the articles you download or use for your research. Most databases will now give you the option of downloading a citation in your preferred citation style.

The preferred citation style for the class is MLA style. You will find further information on the Good Library website, the Purdue OWL, and in your Hacker Pocket Handbook purchased for this course.

Can you find these articles on Auden's "September 1, 1939"?


Burt, Stephen, "'September 1, 1939' Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public," American Literary History, 2003 Fall; 15 (3): 533-59.

Miller, James, "Auden's 'September 1, 1939,'" Explicator, 2004 Winter; 62 (2): 115-18.


Wormser, Baron, "Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century," Sewanee Review, 2008 Summer; 116 (3): 411-427.