Canadian Poetry Online is a web site hosted by The University of Toronto Libraries. It is free of cost and does not require an account to view all areas of the site. The site is divided into three sections: Canadian Poets, Contemporary; Canadian Poets, Nineteenth Century, and Representative Poetry Online.
Canadian Poets, Contemporary is an alphabetical listing of 141 poets. Entries include brief biographical information about the poet, a selection of poems, writing philosophy, publications, criticism, and other information. The site is edited by Sophia Kaszuba, who herself is a published Canadian poet. The writing philosophy section does not always have content, depending on what the poet has supplied, or what has been found to cite from published works about the poet.
The biographical entries about the poets vary in length, but are a useful introduction to the life and times that they lived or live in. Some do not appear to be up to date, as is the case with the entry on P.K. Page, which does not indicate that she passed away on 14 January 2010. Under the Publications tab, the list of publications by Page stops in 2002, even though she continued to publish until 2009. The site itself has a copyright date of 2000, so it may not be the most current. The main page for Canadian Poetry Online states that they have updated the design and contents of each poet's site, but it does not indicate when this was completed, which may explain why there are omissions. Curiously, too, Leonard Cohen is omitted from this list of contemporary poets. Canadian Poetry Online is not searchable, but, as the alphabetical listing of poets is clear, this does not seem to be a necessary feature.
The main site also links to Canadian Poets, Nineteenth Century and gives a sample of 28 poets. The entries are linked to another University of Toronto website called Representative Poetry Online. Representative Poetry Online is a larger project that digitized a textbook called Representative Poetry, established by University of Toronto Professor W.J. Alexander in 1912. There are poems from over 500 poets, from the Old English Period to contemporary times. The site's navigation is markedly different from the Canadian Poetry Online site, but there is both a poet and a poem index for those looking for specific authors and poems, as well as a timeline. The poem index includes title, first line and last line, which is a very useful feature for those with an imperfect recall of a particular poem. The poems from various time periods have footnotes to act as a gloss, and the original publication information is also provided. There is also a search feature for searching keywords of poems, or for a concordance‐style search that finds all occurrences of a word in the poems.
Overall, this site is a good introduction to Canadian poetry, but perhaps best used as an adjunct to other more up to date sources to complement the information available within it. Those users unfamiliar with Canadian poetry might find this information a good starting point for further research.
