Argyle High School

NOTE: If you are not a student, faculty, or staff member of UNT, you must be on the UNT campus to use these databases.

Analyze your Poem

To begin analyzing your poem, go to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  It will help you understand what the poet meant when he or she used different words.  There are many plays on words in poetry that you may discover through investigating the meaning of words.  The OED also tells you what words meant and provides examples of word usage for the time period in which your poem was written.

Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary Online is the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. The online resource contains all the printed materials that appear in the complete 23 volumes.

Find out about the Poet and Investigate Themes

Academic Search Complete is a good general database that you can use to find articles about your poet, time period, and other themes within the poem. Literature Resource Center offers criticism and biographical information. Using these two resources, you should be able to find most of your research.  If you are writing on clothing, the History of Costume database is another good resource to try. Click on the titles below to get to the database. 

Literature Resource Center

Literature Resource Center allows access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of more than 120,000 authors from every age and literary discipline. It includes information on literary figures from all time periods writing in such genres as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, journalism, and more.

Academic Search Complete 

Academic Search Complete is a scholarly collection providing full text journal coverage for nearly all academic areas of study - including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies, etc. Full text for nearly 4,600 scholarly publications, coverage dating back to 1975.

History of Costume

A History of Costume in Slides, Notes, and Commentaries is a six-volume work of visual lectures with 1,500 color slides and slide commentaries. The collection shows, through works of art, the history of clothing for women and men throughout Western civilization from ancient Egypt to 1992.