If you're dealing with collections, such as poems, it's best to leave things as they are. However, that doesn't mean that when putting this collection together you can't hire an artist to do some drawings that are representative of the poems themselves. Many authors do this and the technique goes over very well.

Another thing you could do is take a large collection of poems and have them represented purely in the form of a graphical presentation. You could name your collection 'The Illustrative Poems of' and have each page be a drawing representing the actual poem itself.

You could put the name of the poem at the top of the page with the drawing underneath. Then, under the drawing, include maybe one line from the poem that really illustrates the drawing itself." Something like this would appeal not only to literature lovers but also lovers of art as well.

Another thing you can do, and this is kind of like the idea that I had before I got distracted, is to take a public domain character, say "Alice in Wonderland" and make a whole new story out of it with a new character. Maybe you can call it "Alfred the Butler in Wonderland."

Now, for those of you who don't know who Alfred the Butler is, he's the butler of millionaire Bruce Wayne, who just happens to be Batman. Now, before you could do something like this, you'd first have to find out if you can use the character Alfred the Butler in the story. His character may very well be copyrighted. But you could also do something like "Mary Shelly in Wonderland" and in the story, she falls down the rabbit hole and instead of meeting up with a rabbit, she meets up with Frankenstein and his monster.

You could also include other public domain characters from that era, such as Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy and so on. Yes, you'd have to come up with an interesting story, but the basic idea can come from reading "Alice in Wonderland" since it is public domain.

Again, this is what Walt Disney did with his characters. Another thing you can do is take these works and actually reproduce them as they looked when they were first published. This would of course involve scanning each page and putting it into an ebook, but this would really interest a lot of people.

Or, you can go the opposite route. You can take the work itself and really modernize the type face and the look of the work itself. Maybe add photos to each page or at least at the beginning of each chapter.

Another thing you can do, for those art lovers, is reproduce some classic art works with a twist. Maybe have the Mona Lisa with a beard. Put a cowboy hat on her. Have a cigar sticking out of her mouth. You could create a whole ebook on Mona Lisa variations. Mona Lisa the nurse, the fighter pilot, the librarian and so on.