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Storgy

The Reader's Atlas — Vol. I

Themesof the human record

Every poem turns on a question the species can't put down — love, death, the passage of time. Storgy classifies its public-domain corpus across 46 of those questions, so the same line of argument can be traced from Sappho to Whitman to Dickinson.

Indexed themes
46
Classified poems
~2,900
Sub-themes catalogued
492

Where to begin

01The first subject

Love

736 poems

Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Every century answers love differently — courtly devotion, marital plain-speech, queer longing, divine eros. Open this theme to follow the same word across a thousand years of argument.

Open theme
02The last subject

Death

561 poems

Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me.

From the medieval danse macabre to the modern elegy, death is poetry's most patient interlocutor. The starting point for grief, faith, defiance, and the ode to ordinary mornings.

Open theme
03The given world

Nature

941 poems

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high.

Pastoral, romantic, ecological — nature is where poets go to find a self that isn't quite a self. The theme that runs from Wordsworth to Mary Oliver and beyond.

Open theme

Chapter 01Bonds & belonging

What we owe one another

The lyric of relation — devotion, friendship, the long argument of family, and the quiet labour of forgiveness.

5 themes in chapter

Chapter 02The interior

The weather inside us

Identity, memory, the dream, and the daily forecast of hope and dread that any honest poem has to clock.

9 themes in chapter

Chapter 03Mortality & time

The hour and the years

The long view: childhood and growing up, the patient work of grief, and the metric every other theme is finally measured against.

6 themes in chapter

Chapter 04Spirit, beauty & world

What the world gives back

Where the made and the given meet — faith, the made object, beauty as evidence, and the natural world that frames it all.

4 themes in chapter

Chapter 05Power & conscience

The public weather

Poetry as testimony — war, exile, the failure and pursuit of justice, and the freedom poems argue for in their bones.

6 themes in chapter

Chapter 10Aspirations & burdens

What we chase, what we carry

Happiness, work, money, success, failure — the daily concepts poetry has wrestled with from the eclogue to the modernist office poem.

3 themes in chapter