I want to find out if a poem was copied?

Question

I want to find out if a poem was copied?

Answer 1

Google a few lines of it, if it is a published work chances are you will get a hit.

Answer 2

If it's a plagiarism question, try typing a line or a distinctive phrase from the poem, enclosed in "quotation marks", in Yahoo! web search or an equivalent search engine.  That's the first thing that college professors do.

If that fails and you still are concerned, there are some services like turnitin.com that do a more thorough job of trying to match text.  You might be able to get a professor from the English department of a nearby college to offer to check the poem using whatever service they use.

Answer 3

Do a first line search. That means put the first line of the poem on google or yahoo and it will come up most likely with the poem.