How to Search for Poetry

Only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive.  A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version. Your best bet is to enter your search terms in lower case!

The asterisk (wildcard) is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

Common words, like "to" or "be" are ignored. So if someone plagiarized Shakespeare, you'd never be able to find "to be or not to be." Unless, that is, you put the entire phrase in quotes. The quotes tell the system to search for the entire phrase as if it were a single word, to find it exactly the way you entered it, whether it has ignored words or not.