The library: sources & copyright
Where the texts come from, why some poems show only an excerpt, and what you may reuse.
Where do the poems and biographies come from?
Four public-record sources, named on every relevant page:
- Project Gutenberg — the poem texts themselves.
- Wikidata — poet and work metadata, under a public-domain dedication.
- Wikipedia — the source material for biographies, under CC BY-SA.
- Wikimedia Commons — poet portraits.
Biographies are not copied. Every paragraph is rewritten before publishing. Where Wikidata and Wikipedia disagree on a fact, the Wikidata value wins.
Every poem page links back to the edition its text came from, under "Text source".
See alsoFull sourcing methodology
Is every poem here really in the public domain?
Every full text we publish is, and each poem's status is recorded in the database before it goes live rather than assumed afterwards. The default is the restrictive one: a poem shows only an excerpt unless it has been positively classified as clear.
Classification follows the Berne Convention's life-plus-70 rule, with a second flag for works that are public domain in the United States under the 95-year rule but still in copyright elsewhere.
See alsoHow we classify texts
Why can I only see an excerpt of a poem?
Almost always because of where you are. Some poems are public domain in the United States but still under copyright in the UK, the EU, and other life-plus-70 countries. For those we show the full text to US readers and an excerpt everywhere else.
The gate errs on the side of caution: if we can't tell where a request comes from, we serve the excerpt.
What you still get everywhere is the whole apparatus — the line-by-line analysis, themes, context, and devices — plus a link to read the poem in full at its source, if one exists.
If you have your own copy of the poem, the Poem Analyzer will read the text you paste in regardless of region.
See alsoThe Poem Analyzer
Why isn't a modern poem on the site?
Living poets, and poets whose work is still in copyright worldwide, are not in the corpus as full text. Their pages carry a biography, representative works, and links to buy the books — nothing we don't have the right to publish.
Three things we don't do, stated plainly on /sources/:
- No scraping rights-managed content from literary magazines, paywalled anthologies, or other study-guide sites.
- No verbatim Wikipedia.
- No copyrighted full texts.
Missing a poet you think should be here? Email hello@storgy.com — that's how a good part of the catalogue got planned.
See alsoSuggest a poet
How do I report a wrong fact or a misattributed poem?
Email hello@storgy.com with the URL and what's wrong. Misattributed poems and broken source links are the two most common reports, and both are usually fixed the same day.
Most factual errors trace back to a stale Wikidata or Wikipedia entry. We correct Storgy, and where the upstream record is also wrong we feed the correction back into Wikidata so everyone benefits.
For a wrong or unhelpful AI answer, send the result URL too. That tells us which prompt produced it.
See alsoReport an error
Can I reuse or republish what's on Storgy?
It splits in two. The poems and books in the library are public domain and remain so — take them, no permission needed.
Everything Storgy adds — analyses, study guides, editorial writing, design, and the site's code — is our copyrighted work. Quote it with attribution and a link; don't republish it wholesale.
Scraping the site, bulk-downloading it, or automated access beyond what robots.txt allows is not permitted, and neither is reselling tool output as an automated service.
See alsoTerms of service
How do the translations work?
Two kinds, always labelled. Human public-domain translations name their translator, year, and licence. AI translations are badged as a literal trot — a reading aid for following the original, not a literary translation, and never presented as one.
See alsoBrowse translations
Where do the recitations come from?
They're synthesised readings of poems that are public domain worldwide, produced by Storgy. Free to play for anyone, with no account.
Downloading the MP3 file is a paid-plan feature; listening isn't.
See alsoListen
Still stuck
Didn't find it?
The help centre covers what we get asked most. Anything else — a billing problem, a bug, a poem we've got wrong — goes to a person, who answers within a day.