This is not an expert opinion on copyright, just a simple run down from a man who is often simple and run down.
In the UK if you write anything original down you own the copyright, and when you die your estate will own the copyright for 70 years after the date of your death. It used to be 50 years here, but when the EC decided to harmonise Europe's copyright laws they simply made the longest period, Germany's 70 years, the norm. This is why Kipling was out of copyright and then back in again.
You do not always have to pay to publish or otherwise sell work that is in copyright, but you should always seek the permission of the owner of the right to copy. If you do not, and you are caught, especially if you are seen to be making money from work owned by another, there may be serious, and expensive, legal consequences.
The two lists below are based on the list of titles from The Quince Tree Press and these web pages about favourite poets. I am not guarranteeing the information on either list. Both lists will grow, and if you want a poet included please
Out of copyright poets
William Barnes, William Blake, the Browning's
Robert Burns, Byron,
Lewis Carroll,
Geoffrey Chaucer,
John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Abraham Cowley,
George Crabbe, Emily Dickinson
John Donne,
Thomas Gray,
Thomas Hardy,
George Herbert,
Robert Herrick,
Thomas Hood,
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
A.E. Housman,
John Keats,
Charles Lamb,
Edward Lear,
D.H.Lawrence,
Tom Moore,
Andrew Marvell,
Wilfred Owen/Rupert Brooke,
The Rossettis,
Walter Scott,
William Shakespeare, Shelley,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Edward Thomas,
William Wordsworth,
Any poet who is not physically dead yet, owns the copyright to their own poems. Also:
Shuffled off this coil, but still in copyright poets
Anna Akhmatova, W.H.Auden, John Betcheman, T.S.Eliot, Robert Frost, A.E. Housman, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Pablo Neruda, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Edna St Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, W.B.Yeats
