User blog:George Dance/May 2012

May 2012 - The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 (OBEV) is perhaps the most important poetry anthology of all time. Published in 1900, it sold 500,000 copies of its first edition, profoundly influencing the literary tastes of a generation of English-speakers.

So for our May project, Penny and I decided to make OBEV (in its second edition of 1919, online at bartleby.com), the newest source of poetry links. Since the anthology comprises a Hall of Fame of pre-modern British poets, we gave each poet not only an external link to his or her poem(s), but also a mention in her or his "Recognition" section.

That project, which took about three weeks, allowed us to review a considerable number of the most famous poets featured here. For all of them we continued to add External links to PoemHunter and NNDB (the two sites we began linking in April), and also added a third site -- the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. The overall result is a much richer selection of both poems and biographical material for these poets.

We also continued adding pictures and images, and by the end of the month we had exceeded 700. Cumulatively these give our "About Poets" pages a whole new look. Along the same lines, we redesigned our logo (see above) and our home page (to see, just click the logo).

It was a good month, and we look forward to many more.George Dance 01:34, June 4, 2012 (UTC)