Overview
PoetryDB serves a curated collection of classic English poems via a simple REST API—searchable by author, title, or first line. No authentication or rate limiting to worry about.
Beginner Tip
The URL pattern is the API itself: https://poetrydb.org/{field}/{search-term}. Try https://poetrydb.org/author/Shakespeare to get all Shakespeare poems as JSON immediately.
Measurement Record
What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.
- Request
- GET https://poetrydb.org/author,title/Dickinson;Hope
- Result
- HTTP 200 · application/json · 6,807 bytes · compressed
- Response time
- 351 ms (median of 3) · fastest 335 ms
- Transport
- TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services
- Browser CORS
- Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
- Served by
- cloudflare
- Recorded
- 2026-08-10
Fields Returned
Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.
| Field | Type | Value received |
|---|---|---|
| title | string | Could Hope inspect her Basis |
| author | string | Emily Dickinson |
| lines | array | [1 item] |
| linecount | string | 8 |
Captured Response
Captured from a real request to https://poetrydb.org/author,title/Dickinson;Hope on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.
[
{
"title": "Could Hope inspect her Basis",
"author": "Emily Dickinson",
"lines": [
"Could Hope inspect her Basis"
],
"linecount": "8"
}
] Field Reference
title Title of the poem. author Name of the poet. lines Array of strings where each element is one line of the poem. linecount Total number of lines in the poem as a string. Implementation Example
Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.
const url = "https://poetrydb.org/author,title/Dickinson;Hope";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data); What Can You Build?
Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.
Common Errors & Troubleshooting
Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.
Measured Score Breakdown
Live HTTP request to the API endpoint
Fully tested on Aug 10, 2026
Technical Specifications
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