Rights guide
Public-domain poetry: poems, editions, and translations
Poem Explorer is copyright-free by design, but poetry rights are more precise than author dates alone. A poem, an edition, and a translation can each have different copyright status.
Poem-level checks matter
A poet can have early poems that are public domain and later poems that are still protected. For U.S. use in 2026, the clean target is qualifying material first published in 1930 or earlier.
That is why Poem Explorer records source and rights metadata on every poem instead of relying only on a poet biography.
Translations have their own rights
Rumi, Hafiz, Sa'di, and other older poets raise a special issue: the original poem may be centuries old, but a modern English translation can still be copyrighted.
The corpus therefore prefers older public-domain translations and Project Gutenberg source editions when working with translated poetry.
How agents should use the data
Agents should preserve the source fields, publicDomain fields, tags, and semantic metadata when quoting or recommending poems. Those fields are part of the trust layer for the corpus.