Scrape poems from the Poetry Foundation and build your personal offline treasure trove!

Introduction

I came across the Poetry Foundation website and spent a lot of time reading through the large collection of poems they have. I thought it was a good idea to practice making web-scrapers while building a personal offline collection of poems that I could read whenever I wanted.

Along the way I found a large number of poems on Kaggle (can't remember exactly where from) and decided to include those files in a cleaned up/formatted json file (poems_old.json) with the project as a starter. This project is the result of that effort.

Project Structure

Main Applications

• gui_app.py: 🎨 NEW! Modern graphical user interface (recommended)
• main.py: Command-line interface for searching and saving poems
• random_poem.py: Get a random poem from the collection

GUI Package (gui/)

The GUI has been refactored into a clean, modular structure:

• app.py: Main application class
• styles.py: Theming and color configuration
• widgets.py: Widget creation and layout
• search_handlers.py: Search functionality
• display_handlers.py: Display operations
• event_handlers.py: Event handling
• README.md: Detailed GUI documentation

Core Files

• Poems.py: Main Poems class for scraping and managing poems
• scraper.py: Web scraping functionality
• ChromeDrivers.py: Chrome WebDriver manager
• poems.json: Your personal poem collection (auto-created)
• poems_old.json: Starter collection from Kaggle dataset

Setup

Download the project files and run the following command in the project directory to install the required packages (a virtual environment would be a good idea):

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you'd like, rename the poems_old.json file to poems.json to use the Kaggle poems as a starting point. Or start from scratch by deleting the poems.json file (or ignoring it) and running the main.py file to scrape the your own from the Poetry Foundation website.

Usage

🎨 Graphical Interface (Recommended)

Run the GUI application for the best experience:

python gui_app.py

Features:

• Modern, intuitive interface with clickable links
• Search locally and online seamlessly
• Browse all poets and their poems
• Random poem discovery
• Save poems to custom locations
• Copy to clipboard functionality
• Right-click context menus
• Responsive design with background searches

See gui/README.md for detailed documentation.

💻 Command-Line Interface

For terminal users, run the classic CLI:

python main.py

Pretty simple - follow the prompts to search for poems by title or author. After each search, you can choose to save the poem to a text file or continue searching. Saved text files are stored in the File Saves directory in the project folder.

🎲 Random Poem

Get a random poem from your collection:

python random_poem.py

How It Works

All searches are automatically saved to the poems.json file for offline searching. Future searches will first search the offline collection before scraping the website for faster results.