Princeps Poesis:About

Princeps Poesis is a project founded by Yigru Zeltil, dedicated to poetry (and closely related genres).

Scope

The project currently consists of a database including data on, primarily: paper books, audiobooks, e-books (which may or may not include mixed media; for eg., certain conceptual poets published by Gauss PDF may release ZIP archives including text files alongside multimedia files).

The initial dataset focused on Romanian books, but it is currently expanding to include eventually all languages from around the world in which poetry is known to have been published!

Specifications

Here we should include not only books that consist exclusively of poetry, but generally books whose content is more than 10% texts which may be considered poetry, with possible exceptions for certain situations (for eg., a book which features primarily a dramatic play, but also includes as an addendum a poem that may be significant for the author).

Our definition of poetry may include any of the following (possibly non-exhaustive list):

• lyrical poetry (rhymed/metered/free verse)
• epigrams
• epics
• prose poetry/short forms of poetic prose
• plays in verse/dramatic poetry
• novels-in-verse
• artists' books with focus on text
• concrete/visual poetry
• sound poetry/performance poetry/slam/spoken word
• conceptual poetry/miscellaneous texts associated with conceptual poetry

Manifestos may also be included, but preferably not just any type of essay, just as we don't focus on theoritical and critical literature, although the latter will be referenced on the Critical References section of each book on which we have such data.

Anyone who has published a book with such content, including here private press books and historically significant unique-copy, manuscript-like books, is eligible to be present in the database. If there's a record of one's book anywhere else online, one may not request deletion. It's best to keep the data exhaustive and accurate, without the possibility of the service being abused by authors with second thoughts regarding what they've been published (although we do allow a mention of a certain book being repudiated by their author) or by trolls or other threat actors who might want to tamper.

In effect, there are NO notability standards, even though in my process of populating the database, I have usually started with authors who are featured in canonical lists or in dictionaries.

Aims

While on the Internet there are very large generalist book databases which incidentally include most of the contemporary books you'll see in this database, this project attempts to create a database specialized on poetry from anywhere and of any era. Other databases rely mostly on the data provided by shopping websites or the repositories of some, usually Western-based, libraries. Not all of the libraries that are online are even connected.

A criticism I have towards sites like Goodreads is that they are cumbersome to navigate. For eg., on Goodreads, a book page only leads the user to its author, but the user cannot as quickly query books published by the same publishing house; while there is some basic book information being given, such as pages or barcode, there is no dedicated section for something like the colophone for books which have one; occassionally, the page specifies this book is on some user-generated list (which have typically limited number of items) or (automatically generated?) shelf with other books that may be of the same style/movement or have the same subject matter, but there isn't a genre marker by which one can navigate.

Past history

Between 2011 and 2026, the dataset of this project was located (in a fairly raw format, with asterisks distinguishing each book item, and including only some basic book data - not even the ISBN barcode -, with the notable exception of featuring book covers) on a Blogspot (Blogger) page.

In 2011, it initially consisted of fairly short list of Romanian poetry books from the year 2010 that I (Yigru Zeltil) felt was more generous than the extremely limited coverage of poetry books in the year retrospectives published by local literary magazines.

Over time, the list has become a series of yearly lists (from current date back to 1918); their internal scope also expended, as I became less and less convinced I can judge whether a book "deserves" to be shortlisted, before deciding upon aiming for the exhaustive coverage of all the poetry that's being published in my country, for which there wasn't a reliable database or other indicator of sorts - bookstores only hold a relatively small number of the overall published books, and not even the National Library of Romania holds records on everything that is effectively published, only a catalogue of books which are announced to be officially published (some of which never end up being printed; there are also books which do not have an ISBN barcode or, for whatever reason, which were published with a fake/duplicate ISBN) and a catalog of books which have managed to land in the legal depot of the National Library (yet despite it being a legal requirement since 1993, not all publishing houses or authors bother to send printed copies to them).

In 2024, the new name Princeps Poesis and the globally-expanded scope of the project were announced; I have started on WhyDonate a crowdfunding campaign, which however failed to meet its goal.

Present and future

In January 2026, I have received the Gheorghe Iova prize for the Princeps Poesis project.

In February 2026, a very early pilot version of the website (on the same domain) was hosted by my friend Rho. By 21th of March 2026, I've migrated the website to Hostinger VPS (basic subscription, so expect potential technical issues).

Acknowledgments

My thankfulness goes to:

• Răzvan Țupa and everyone who voted for my project to win the Gheorghe Iova prize (Paula Erizanu, V. Leac, Teona Galgoțiu, Dmitri Miticov, Adriana Gheorghe)
• Grigore Șoitu for suggesting MediaWiki and helping with some of the troubleshooting
• Rho for hosting the pilot version of the website and dealing with much troubleshooting
• Nada Gordon and Iosif Vladimir-Zifceac for donating to the crowdfunding campaign
• the developers of MediaWiki and of all the extensions I am using (especially the one dev who helped me troubleshoot Cargo, DataTransfer and PageForms)
• everyone who has made small contributions with book data or cover photographs over the years, from poets and poetry readers such as Lucian Brad, editors, to institutions such as Biblioteca Județeană Constanța, Biblioteca Județeană Teleorman and others