History and poetry are usually distinguished in terms of poetry as fiction and history as fact. However, as much evidence exists to dispute the notion of poetry as purely a purveyor of fiction devoid of didactic purpose as there is to support the notion of history as a series of fictionally constructed narratives biased by individual cultural identity and experience. One of the earliest theoretical discussions of this problem traces back to Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, the poet and the historian differ not so much in the writing of verse or prose, but in the distinction that poetry relates what may happen, while history relates what has happened. Poetry is, therefore, more philosophical and higher than history.
Poetry expresses the universal while history expresses the particular or actual.
Over a thousand short poems and excerpts from longer texts and works of epic proportions have been compiled into a catalog of poetry depicting educational themes. These have been identified through several methods. The primary method has been to identify a set of keywords, for example, student or teacher , and then using these keywords to search poetry indices in both book and electronic form by subject, title, and first line. Once a poem is identified each is located in an anthology or other primary or secondary source, gathered, photocopied, added to the physical catalog, and added to the electronic database. These poems have been amassed from literally hundreds of different anthologies and collected works.