Looking for literary inspiration?  Perhaps you’re after a particular quotation or just a reminder of exactly who it was that wrote such and such a poem, novel or work of reference?  Bartleby is one of the largest and oldest free, full-text collections of verse on the web, and if you aren't aware of what it has to offer, it may just be worth a quick visit to the website to check out what it can do for you.

In particular, it features an exhaustive collection of British and American verse published between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Bartleby’s archive is regularly accessed by a wide range of users, including students, researchers, educators, and the general reader.

Founded in 1993 as “Project Bartleby,” the electronic archive also features a diverse collection of rare literary and philosophical essays published between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth century. Notably, it includes works as diverse as the Bhagavad Gita and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

In addition, Bartleby also provides users free access to an exhaustive body of fiction and nonfiction. The fiction archive features the 70-volume Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, among other works. The nonfiction archive includes classic essays and works of literary criticism. It also features a large collection of student-written essays.

Bartleby also boasts the largest collection of quotations. With as many as 86,000 wide-ranging entries that include quotations from Genesis to Shakespeare to the New York Times, Bartleby is the largest collection of quotations ever assembled in print or electronic form.

A leader in the electronic publishing industry, Bartleby strives to make literature and nonfiction more accessible to the general public, and it certainly seems to be achieving that.  Whether you are after an elusive literary reference or perhaps academic reassurance, this may just be the perfect place to start your search, and how refreshing it is to find a resource like this that doesn’t require membership, password, or any other kind of log-in; just type in your search criteria and away you go.

On behalf of writers, poets and literary enthusiasts everywhere may I just say: Cheers Bartleby!