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Poetry is very difficult to find on the web, unless it's old enough to be out of copyright; print sources may be your best bet if you're looking for a specific poem which is fairly recent. The following sites will have at least a representative sample of the works of poets, generally up until the late 19th - early 20th centuries:
Bartleby.com: Verse
http://www.bartleby.com/verse/
This section of the Bartleby.com site includes the online text of several public-domain poetry anthologies and collections, including The Oxford Book of English Verse, Modern American Poetry , Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. , and many others. There is a search engine for searching all of Bartleby.com's texts, and you can also narrow it down to just the Verse section.
An Index of Poets in Representative Poetry Online
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/intro.html
This is the author index to a site run out of the University of Toronto;
it can also be searched by title, date, and keyword. The emphasis is on
British poetry, but it is quite comprehensive within that framework; in
addition, each poet on this site has at least two or three poems listed.
Locating poems which have appeared in Dear Abby or Ann
Landers is especially tricky. There is no compilation of Dear
Abby columns, but she does have a
site
http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/viewda.cfm
which allows you to post a question for others to review; it is
possible that other people who access this site may know of the poem for
which you are looking.
Ann Landers has a site
http://www.creators.com/lifestyle_show.cfm?columnsName=ala
which has an archive of columns and an "Ask Ann Landers" feature by which
you can write to her. There is also a compilation of Ann Landers columns
available; in hardback, it's called Wake Up and Smell the
Coffee (New York: Villard, 1996); in paperback, it's called
The Best of Ann Landers (New York: Fawcett
Columbine, 1997).
In addition, a web search for "Ann Landers" and "poems" or "Dear Abby" and
"poems" (for more on web searching, see below) will find some sites which
have poems from these columns; one of them may be the one you're looking
for.
If you're looking for a specific poem on the web, you may be able to track
down a site which features it. Using a search engine such as
AltaVista
(http://www.altavista.com/),
search on the title of the poem as a phrase:
+"the charge of the light brigade"
or the first line, as a phrase but without punctuation:
+"half a league half a league half a league onward"
or any combination of bits of these, with the poet:
+charge +league +tennyson
Some university libraries have put poetry online, as have some university
English departments; searches such as those shown above will find these,
if they're out there.
Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry
10th edition: Columbia University Press, 1994.
This is an index to poetry which has been published in anthologies (which
most well-known poems are). You can look up a poem by title, author, first
line, or last line; each entry will then tell you in which anthology it
can be found.
If you want to know what poem a particular quotation came from:
Columbia Granger's Dictionary of Poetry
Columbia University Press, 1992.
This is organized alphabetically by poet; it lists frequently quoted
sections of poems, along with the title of the poem and the anthology in
which it can be found. If you don't know the poet, it also has a title
index and a keyword index; the latter is particularly useful if you're
looking for a quote, and you don't know much about it except that it
contained a certain word.
For information on schools of poetry, criticism of poetry, and poetic
terms:
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics
Princeton University Press, 1993.
This is arranged in alphabetical order by topic; the topics cover schools
of poetry (for example, the Romantics), poetic terms (for example,
sonnet), and the like. The entries are detailed but not too long, and each
one has a bibliography.
A good, thorough anthology of poetry:
Norton Anthology of Poetry
3rd edition: Norton,1983.
A selection of poetry through time, ranging from anonymous ballads to
modern works.
If you want to find more books like this, or books of and about poetry in
general, they can be found
under the 800's in a public library, and
the Library of Congress call numbers starting with PN in
most
university libraries. Normally, call numbers need to be more specific
than this, but poetry is scattered throughout this range: anthologies of
poetry, works by only one poet, and poetry in different languages all
have different call numbers.
If you wish to
look up similar titles in either a
card catalog or an on-line library catalog, the official Library
of
Congress Subject Headings under which they can be found are:
Poetry--Collections
Poetry--[name of country] for example:
Poetry--United States
This pathfinder created by Deb DeGeorge
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