BY JENNY LONG

Poetry is big business online. There has been a boom in digital poetry in the last few years and sites like Spillwords have become some of the largest on the Web.

Up there at the very top of destinations for online poets’s work is The Poetry Fellowship based in the United Kingdom. The Poetry Fellowship is based in a Georgian building in Taunton in England, in an area once frequented by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

A video on the Fellowship has been produced and can be accessed here:

The Fellowship exists to promote fine poetry and find talented poets worldwide. The Fellowship’s website houses a useful resource for poets who wish to get published and its editors consider any poetry sent in by email or by mail – written in English – for publication on the Poetry Fellowship Hall of Fame.

Publishers regularly read the content on the Fellowship’s Hall of Fame. Those poets lucky enough to get published in the Hall of Fame qualify for a Poetry Fellowship Certificate and the top 200 poems received during the course of the year will qualify for inclusion in the Poetry Fellowship anthology published offline in hardback at Christmas time each year.

There is a big problem with poetry plagiarism on the Web. The Poetry fellowship runs a strict No Plagiarism policy and any fellows or other submitter found to have engaged in plagiarism will be immediately shown the door by the Poetry Fellowship authorities.

In the words of Coleridge:

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.