IANAL - not a lawyer

It is hard to answer your question, because though it seems very
simple, it is probably not the question you wanted to ask.

Can you create a collection of works. Certainly, even if they are
still under copyright, as long as it is for your own use, and not made
public. If you want to publish that collection, even if only on your
personnal web site, for free, you have to get permission from the
copyright holder or to restrict yourself to works in the public
domain.

You specify that you are interested in "19th century public domain
poems". If it is public domain, you have nothing to worry about
(skipping possibly moral rights in some countries). But then why
specify "19th century", which is an irrelevant information ? I
suspect, possibly wrongly, that you think that they should be public
domain because they were written in the 19th century. That is a wrong
assumption.

The assumption is probably true if the poems were first published in
the USA; I am not sure, since the history of copyright law in the USA
created a very messy situation. However, even if written in English,
or authored by an american citizen, these works could have been published first
in another country than the USA. Then this other country is considered
as country of origin of the work (Berne Convention art. 5). In that case, the
general rules of the Berne convention apply, even for works published
before 1923, and it is essentially the current US copyright law that
has to be taken into account. The duration of copyright is author's
life + 70 years. This means that the early works of an author who died
in 1960 at the age of 90 will not be in the public domain before 2031,
even though they were published in the 19th century. (this is in
agreement with the comment of user dmm, though I do not know where he
got the 150 years figure, which makes no sense to me).

Note, furthermore that when the country of origin is not the USA, the
work need not be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office for its
copyright to be protected in the U.S.A. (unlike works of
U.S. origin). But the protection remains minimal without registration
(see articles 411 and 412 of US Copyright Law).

Hence, to know about the copyright situation, you have to investigate
among other things were the work was initially published.

The fact that copyright ownership may have changed hands, through sale
or heritage, is totally irrelevant, except for the fact that only the
current holder of the copyright may give you permission, and he must
be identified and contacted.

The fact that the poem may have been published in several anthologies
or collections is irrelevant. The country of origin for the copyright results from the first
publication (see country of origin issue above). That means however that you may
have to ascertain where a particular piece was published first, which may not be obvious for a small piece that may have been published several times, as part of different collections.

It is often the case that copyright is transferred to the publisher
when the work is published, but this is not always the case. It is
purely a contractual matter.

Another point is that copyright is not a monolithic entity. It can be
cut in pieces. For example the author may have tranferred copyright
for printed publication to his publisher, while retaining digital
copyright. This is implicitly the case in some (many?) countries as
the publication contracts before 2000 did not generally include
transfer of digital rights.

So if you intend to publish your collection, the kind of rights you
have to clear, and the rights holders who can grant permission, are
not necessarily the same, depending on how you want to publish. However, the duration of these rights is the
same and depend only on the date of the author's demise.

Note that you do not have to depend on publishers. It is quite possible to publish books without them. Indeed, one may wonder whether there is any reason for their existence in the digital world.

Another point is whether you can claim some rights over your
collection. Essentially, yes, if it can show originality or serious investment (laws vary ... which is a problem for Internet publication), which does
not mean simply being different from other collections - a very
subjective assessment. This gives you no right over individual works
in the collection.

And of course there are even more complicated situations. Copyright is mostly an exercise in futile complexity and obfuscation, at the expense of authors and public.

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