About Us
PoetrySoup is a huge international community of over 43,000+ poets. PoetrySoup also houses over 1 million poems written by a wide variety of amateur, professional, and famous poets.
PoetrySoup offers many services through its website, while its members promote and manage frequent poetry contests.
PoetrySoup is known for its loyal, strong, welcoming, and growing community of poets (called Soupers). It is also known for featuring published and unpublished poets weekly.
PoetrySoup welcomes content from external sources like public and private educational institutions, teachers, writing organizations, publishers, and similar resources. Any collaboration that PoetrySoup deems will benefit members is welcomed.
Famous Poets
While PoetrySoup's database of famous poets is relatively small, it does feature famous poets including Maya Angelou, Ben Jonson, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Shel Silverstein, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and more.
Publishing
PoetrySoup started publishing anthologies in 2020.
How Financed
PoetrySoup is a very small privately-owned website. We are not a huge corporation and while we are not a non-profit organization, our primary means of support comes from revenue generated by advertising. Because PoetrySoup is an advertising-supported website, we request that you turn off your ad blocker (AdBlock or AdBlock Plus) when accessing the PoetrySoup site. Without advertising income, PoetrySoup can't make website enhancements. We want to continue to make PoetrySoup better. We also want to keep PoetrySoup alive and it is expensive to maintain an international website like PoetrySoup. Thus, since PoetrySoup is a free website (and we want to keep it that way).
PoetrySoup only accepts poems written by the poets that submit them. All Poems submitted are published as the poet’s original work and under the poet’s copyright. PoetrySoup and sister websites display and publish poems always as the poet’s original work and under the poet’s own copyright.
All poetry by famous poets, not submitted by the poet, is provided for educational research only. The Copyright Law of the United States Of America (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research."
Censorship
PoetrySoup believes that private companies like PoetrySoup have the right to prohibit content or establish rules to benefit their communities. However, we limit our influence on creative liberties regarding poetry.
With that in mind, inflammatory and derogatory comments or poems about ethnic groups, cultures, alternate lifestyles, entire religious groups, and the like are not acceptable in PoetrySoup. This censorship does not apply to politics! The political arena is fair game. However, writing poems featuring hate speech targeting, for instance, Jewish, Arab, or Islamic people is not tolerated.
PoetrySoup has members from all over the world and from different cultures, beliefs, and faiths. The PoetrySoup staff does not see nor acknowledge national borders. So, keep this in mind when writing poems and comments on PoetrySoup.
Affiliated Websites
PoetrySoup is owned by Arczis Web Technologies, Inc. The websites below are associated with PoetrySoup. All poems on our sister or affiliated websites use the same database and poems are all managed via PoetrySoup. So, if you edit or delete a poem on PoetrySoup it is edited and deleted on ALL websites.