Poetry Reader Screensaver
The Poetry Reader screensaver shows real public-domain poems from the key-less PoetryDB API, set as a calm page — title, poet and verse — and gently scrolled when a poem runs longer than the screen. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Poetry Reader screensaver works
The saver reads PoetryDB directly in your browser — no key and no account.
Real public-domain poems from the key-less PoetryDB API, set as a calm page — title, poet and verse — and gently scrolled when a poem runs longer than the screen..
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and the accent can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
Where the poems come from
PoetryDB describes itself as a poetry API. It returns poems as JSON or plain text, and each record carries an author, a title, the poem’s lines as a list, and a line count, so a program can search by any of those. Its poem texts are public domain, sourced from archives such as Project Gutenberg, and a screensaver can therefore show whole poems rather than snippets.
The reader presents one poem at a time as a calm page, with title, poet and verse, and scrolls gently when a poem is longer than the screen. Because the data is stored line by line, the layout can preserve line breaks instead of reflowing text into paragraphs, which matters in poetry. Longer works, like some narrative poems, simply take more time to read through.
Public-domain status depends on when a work was published and on the country, so the collection leans toward earlier centuries and away from living poets. The texts are as transcribed in the database, and PoetryDB notes that its curation, including corrections and standardised titles, is licensed separately under CC BY 4.0. They may differ in spelling, punctuation or stanza breaks from a scholarly edition. The selection is not a canon or a ranking of quality; it is whatever the database holds.
A worked example
Real public-domain poems from the key-less PoetryDB API, set as a calm page — title, poet and verse — and gently scrolled when a poem runs longer than the screen.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Data comes straight from PoetryDB in your browser.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from PoetryDB and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Does it need an internet connection?
- Yes — it reads a live source, so it needs a connection to update.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- Why are there no modern poets?
- Copyright usually lasts long after an author’s death, so recent poems are not freely redistributable and are mostly absent from public-domain collections.
- Are the texts reliable editions?
- They are database transcriptions and can differ from authoritative editions in punctuation, spelling or line breaks.
- What does each poem record contain?
- PoetryDB stores an author, a title, the lines of the poem and a line count, so the reader can show the title and poet above the verse.