Credits & sources

Every poem in Versos is in the public domain: each author's verified death year falls at least 80 years in the past (the strictest applicable copyright term, Spain's vida + 80 rule for pre-1987 deaths); a translation needs its translator's to fall there too. Every poem records the edition its text was taken from.

— distinct poems, clean and licence-cleared, in seven languages. Computed by our corpus gate at each release (): one count per poem, however many editions we found, only when the poem's text comes from an edition we may publish, and only once its text is clean (no page furniture, footnotes or broken lines). The library lists entries in all.

Text sources

• Project Gutenberg — public-domain books, each poem traced to its book (gutenberg.org).
• Wikisource — community-proofread public-domain texts from fr, it, es, pt, de and en.wikisource.org. The poems are public domain; Wikisource's own additions are CC BY-SA 4.0 and we use none of them. Thanks to the Wikisource volunteers.
• chinese-poetry — the Complete Tang Poems (全唐詩), the Book of Songs (詩經) and the Songs of Chu (楚辭) from the chinese-poetry collection (MIT licence); texts published in simplified script are shown in traditional script (OpenCC).
• TextGrid Digitale Bibliothek — German poetry from the TextGrid Repository's digital library (texts from zeno.org), published under CC BY 3.0 DE by TextGrid / editura.de.
• Standard Ebooks — carefully proofread public-domain poetry collections, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 (standardebooks.org). Thank you to their volunteers.
• PoetryDB — public-domain English poetry (poetrydb.org, CC BY 4.0).
• Poetry Greats — poem-level extracts from Project Gutenberg (CC0).

Some poems are still served from editions we are replacing with clean ones (poesi.as, the DISCO sonnet corpus, a public-domain-poetry.com scrape, PoeTree's English corpus, Projekt Gutenberg-DE). They are not counted in the number above, and nothing new is taken from them. The Song lyrics (宋詞) from the chinese-poetry collection are listed but not counted either: the collection does not name the printed edition they come from, so we are matching them to a named public-domain edition first.

Translations & glosses

Line-level English/Spanish glosses and learner notes are machine-generated for this app and carry no third-party rights.

Audio — recitation

All recitations are AI-generated for Versos. Every voice is a designed synthetic voice; none is a clone of a real person. These are not recordings of a human reading the poem.

Audio — background music

Each poem is set to a mood-matched ambient bed, chosen automatically from a library of Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) instrumental music. Attribution to each composer is required by their licence and given here in full:

• Kevin MacLeod — incompetech.com. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Jason Shaw — audionautix.com. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Eric Matyas — soundimage.org. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Chris Zabriskie — chriszabriskie.com. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

No endorsement by any composer is implied. Per-track titles and full credit lines are carried in the app's music manifest. To mute the music, use the speaker toggle on any poem.

Design & build

Versos is built and operated by DSL4 Digital. Interface design by Viva Grafix.

Takedown

If you believe any text here is not in the public domain, contact [email protected] and it will be reviewed and removed promptly while under review.