Includes the full text of almost 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. African-American Poetry is a resource for literary scholars and for researchers in black studies, linguistics, women's studies, black literary heritage, and comparative studies. The poetry explores a multitude of topics, including abolition, children, civil rights, dreams, education, fugitive slave law, Indian raids, liberty, political issues, prejudice, and slavery.
The database includes allegories, broadsides, children's poems, elegiac poems, epics, hymns, odes, patriotic poems, and sonnets. The poets are among those included in the William French et al. bibliography, Afro-American Poetry and Drama, 1760-1975. The full-text of the poems is included and is fully searchable. For modern African-American poetry, see 20th Century African-American Poetry