Online Editor's Introduction (Version 3.0) The Online Versions Representative Poetry Online , version 3.0, includes 4,079 English poems by 618 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry , established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912 (one of the first books published by the University of Toronto Press), and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s. Its electronic founder and editor since 1994 is Ian Lancashire , who is a member of the Department of English, University of Toronto. He edits the poems in affection for and gratitude to their authors, whose works enrich and restore our lives. The bibliographical sources from which the selections are made hold great libraries of poetry for readers and critics venturing out on their own, and for the reader interested in reading more by one poet. If you enjoy these poems, you may also learn from them by growing interested in the poets, the periods in which they lived, and the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the conversations which poets have with their predecessors. The first online version (Dec. 15, 1994) offered poems in the third edition of Representative Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962-63, reprinted with corrections 1967), a historical collection of some 730 poems by about 80 poets from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Algernon Charles Swinburne. The second online version (Sept. 31, 1996) was supplemented by many poets and poems appearing in the edition of 1935 (revised and enlarged, 1941-46) but not carried over into the 1962-63 edition for lack of space. In 1997-98, poems found in the editions of 1912 and 1916 that did not find a place afterwards were added, with notes. Several hundred new poets and UTEL (University of Toronto Library), a collection of texts and writings by Department members, were created at that time. In 2000-2002, funded by the Office of the Provost, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Department of English, RPO was transformed from a collection of HTML files into a relational database. Ian Lancashire devised the database fields, and Dr. Marc Plamondon programmed and implemented the database. Sian Meikle, the University's Digital Librarian, supervised programming, with help from Alan Darnell. Dr. Plamondon, with help from Christopher Jennings and Ian Lancashire, transferred poems, one by one, from the old HTML site into the database. The conversion enabled the team to expand information about the poets (work undertaken by Katrine Raymond) and Dr. Plamondon to add a last-line index, and, among many other things, to automate index production and put in place a concordance search. RPO Version 3 came online on October 16, 2002. Marc Plamondon became associate editor on June 1st, 2005. Since 1994, the general editor has newly prepared several hundred poets not in the original printed editions and added them to the online version. The "what's new" file gives details of these additions. Version 3.0 also offers six indexes (title, first-line, poets, timeline, calendar of year's days, glossary, and the poets' works by date of birth), a bibliography, and a search engine that are not in any printed edition. The texts of the poems in the printed editions are based on the books or manuscripts in which they originally appeared. Their spelling was generally normalized in the edited volumes. New texts, found only in the online version, are transcribed from original editions, mainly without altered spelling. The Printed Editions Representative Poetry was produced on many occasions from 1912 to 1967 by faculty who were formerly members of the University of Toronto combined Departments of English. (Each college, whether religious or nondenominational, had its own English faculty then.) See the history of Representative Poetry for details. The founding co-editors were W. J. Alexander , Professor of English at University College, and the first professor of English appointed at that college, and his assistant William Hall Clawson . After Alexander's retirement, Clawson and other members of the Department undertook the editorial duties. In general, all editors selected poems for inclusion by drawing on both critical judgment and affection. The English Department wished, in the words of the General Editors of the last edition (often termed the third edition), "to prepare its own anthology of poetry for the use of students, particularly in the pass (now the general) course." This teaching collection came to be used widely outside Toronto in Canada and in some US institutions. As a cooperative, non-commercial venture by faculty with widely differing approaches to their common subject, Representative Poetry was unusual then, as now. A few years after the University of Toronto published the final corrected edition, the Combined Departments became a single entity, and the former Honours degree was replaced by specialist, major, and minor programmes. No longer did English students have to proceed through an identical sequence of courses. They could choose different combinations of courses. For this and other reasons, the Department chose not to continue editing or using Representative Poetry . In 1971 the University of Toronto Press then distributed the remaining copies of the last edition throughout the then Third World. In 1993 Linda Corman, Librarian at Trinity College, University of Toronto, encouraged the editor to participate in an experimental Web resources program at the main Library. He then obtained the permission of the University of Toronto Press, specifically Wally Brooker, to reedit the volumes online. Sian Meikle, now Digital Librarian at Toronto, advised on the structuring and designing the poet and poem Web pages; and Sharine Leung, head of the New College computing facility, rough-scanned the printed volumes. The editor is now responsible for the proofreading, indexing, encoding, and annotation of all Representative Poetry Online files. The Web Development Group at the Library not only publishes the collection but creates the keyword-search facility. Differences between the Two Editions First, all information, poems, and commentaries are stored in a Microsoft Access database, which is made available for querying on the World Wide Web through Cold Fusion and the Standard Query Language (SQL). Second, whereas the poems followed one another in chronological order in the printed editions, the online poems have no fixed place in the electronic edition. Readers must use the indexes to orient themselves. As a result, there are now many more ways of viewing and combining the poems than in the printed books. Finally, information in the notes in the printed edition has been linked hypertextually with the lines in the poems. Instead of looking up notes at the back of a printed edition, a reader makes a single keystroke or mouse-click on a highlighted word or passage in the text. Editorial Methods The 1994 online edition was a collection of linked HTML files. They were edited with UNIX emacs, sed (the UNIX stream-editor) and simple perl programs. By using UNIX grep, fgrep, and sort to search for SGML tags and the lines they delimit, I was able to extract and sort titles, first lines, and dates into basic indexes. Until 2002, I entered or scanned most poems, and constructed all the indexes, manually. Copyright Most poems in Representative Poetry Online are in the public domain. The Editors, the Department of English, and the University of Toronto Press assert no copyright claim on these works. Only the collection as a whole, its editorial framework, introduction, notes, and indexes of these Web collections are subject to the above copyright restriction. Where a poem is in copyright, Representative Poetry Online has received permission from the copyright-holder to publish it. Readers cannot publish or distribute copyrighted texts without the explicit written permission of the copyright-holder. Anyone wishing to republish copyrighted poems in Representative Poetry Online must ask the copyright-holder, normally the print-publisher, for permission to do so. The Representative Poetry Online editor, as far as possible, respects the current copyright law of the country of which a poet was citizen at the time he or she wrote the work in question. Representative Poetry Online would gladly rectify any unwitting infringements on copyright. Usually, copyright constraints explain why well-respected poets are not represented. Usage and Availability Permission is hereby given to use Representative Poetry for non-commercial educational uses, that is, for teaching, research, and study, as long as copyright information is not removed from any Representative Poetry Online file, the authors of its commentaries are clearly stated, and no charge is made for use of the collection.