Library trust
Sources & text provenance
Every full poem now carries its own source, edition reference, review date, jurisdiction decision, and text fingerprint. The source record belongs to the work—not to the catalog as a whole.
Reviewed 18 July 2026
Primary corpus sources
Imported texts come from PoetryDB and public transcriptions on Wikisource. Those imports are committed to the repository: a production build never fetches or silently changes a poem. Curated texts identify a historical edition or a work-specific source search on the poem page.
What the fingerprint means
We calculate a SHA-256 fingerprint from the displayed title, author record, and lines. It makes a later correction visible and lets a report identify the exact version that appeared here. A fingerprint proves version identity; it does not itself prove authorship or copyright status.
Translations are separate works
A historical poem and an English translation can have different rights. We name the translator and cited edition where known. A QuillOak translation is labeled as such and is not presented as the wording of a historical translator.
Spelling, punctuation & corrections
We preserve source spelling and punctuation unless a visible editorial note says otherwise. We correct transcription errors rather than quietly modernizing a text. See the corrections process or read the full rights policy.
Rhyme, syllable & stress data
Rhyme matches, syllable counts, and stress patterns come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University, redistributed under its permissive BSD-style license), combined with a commonness ranking and reviewed 2026-07-18. The dictionary models General American English: other accents, dialects, names, and performance choices can legitimately change a count or a match, which is why every page and tool labels these results as approximate. Alternate pronunciations are normalized to one entry and flagged as variants. Near-rhyme lists for famously rhymeless words are curated by hand, phrase rhymes are labeled separately from word rhymes, and coined non-words are excluded. Report a bad or missing match through the corrections checklist.