Famous Great Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Great poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous great poems. These examples illustrate what a famous great poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...prohibited—not God’s, or any.
All comes by the body—only health puts you rapport with the universe.
Produce great persons, the rest follows.
4
America isolated I sing;
I say that works made here in the spirit of other lands, are so much poison in The States.
(How dare such insects as we see assume to write poems for America?
For our victorious armies, and the offspring following the armies?)
Piety and conformity to them that like!
Peace, obesity, a...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...o—
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention—easy—Here—
Nor any Placard boast me—
It's full as Opera—
341
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Or Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Fre...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onio...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...w the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
Unrolls her gorgeous-coloured tapestry
To no less eager eyes; often indeed
In the great epic of Polymnia's scroll I love to read
How Asia sent her myriad hosts to war
Against a little town, and panoplied
In gilded mail with jewelled scimitar,
White-shielded, purple-crested, rode the Mede
Between the waving poplars and the sea
Which men call Artemisium, till he saw Thermopylae
Its steep ravine spanned by a narrow wall,
And on the nearer ...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...shape
Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice
Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkling brow,
Naked and bare of its great diadem,
Peers like the front of Saturn? Who had power
To make me desolate? Whence came the strength?
How was it nurtur'd to such bursting forth,
While Fate seem'd strangled in my nervous grasp?
But it is so; and I am smother'd up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonitions to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above that dark was no relieving star.
If yet that terrored night I think or say,
As death's cold hands its fears resuming are.
Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell,
The hopeless, pathless, lightless hours forgot,
I turn my tale to that which next befell,
When the dawn opened, and the night was no...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...e ribs and throat,
To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.
O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself—receiving identity through
materials,
and loving them—observing characters, and absorbing them;
O my soul, vibrated back to me, from them—from facts, sight, hearing, touch, my
phrenology, reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like;
The real life of my senses and flesh, transce...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ed snow, and then blew free again—the Coles
Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,
Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.
Meserve was first to speak. He pointed backward
Over his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,
“You can just see it glancing off the roof
Making a great scroll upward toward the sky,
Long enough for recording all our names on.—
I think I’ll just call up my wife and tell her
I’m here—so far—and starting on again.
I’ll ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil;
Each has his main-sledge—they are all out—(there is a great heat in
the fire.)
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements;
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms;
Over-hand the hammers swing—over-hand so slow—over-hand so sure:
They do not hasten—each man hits in his place.
13
The ***** holds firmly the reins of his four horses—the block swags
...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...s myself;
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all great poems also;
I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles;
(My judgments, thoughts, I henceforth try by the open air, the road;)
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like
me;
I think whoever I see must be happy.
5
From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and ...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...DEDICATION
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?
Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?
In cloud of clay so cast to heaven
What shape ...Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...nature her release
From all the woes that in the world abound:
Nay with his sorrow may his love increase,
If from man's greater need beauty redound,
And claim his tears for homage of his peace.
9
Thus to thy beauty doth my fond heart look,
That late dismay'd her faithless faith forbore;
And wins again her love lost in the lore
Of schools and script of many a learned book:
For thou what ruthless death untimely took
Shalt now in better brotherhood restore,
And save my bat...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...is bell.
He was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace
The least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white--
A wonderful thing to be seen!
To the horror of all who were present that day,
He uprose in full evening dress,
And with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say
What his tongue could no longer express.
Down he sank in a chair--ran his hands through his hair--
And chanted in mimsiest tones
Words wh...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
... Would surely be a tedious tale. In high and low, above, below, In great and small, in round and square, In tree and tower was Johnny seen, In bush and brake, in black and green, 'Twas Johnny, Johnny, every where. She's past the bridge that's in the dale, And now the thought torments her sore, Johnny perhaps his horse forsook,<...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the
stormy sea, and the destructive sword. are portions of
eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion. woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool. & the sullen frowning fool. shall be
both thought wise. that they ma...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...>"
And darkly fell her answer dread
Upon his unresisting head,
Like half a hundredweight of lead.
"The Good and Great must ever shun
That reckless and abandoned one
Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.
"The man that smokes - that reads the TIMES -
That goes to Christmas Pantomimes -
Is capable of ANY crimes!"
He felt it was his turn to speak,
And, with a shamed and crimson cheek,
Moaned "This is harder than Bezique!"
But when she asked him "Wherefore so?"
He felt...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream.
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to & fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, yet so
Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer's bier.--
Old age & youth, manhood & infancy,
Mixed in on...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...any one year, than Mr. Southey has done harm to himself by his absurdities in his whole life; and this is saying a great deal. But I have a few questions to ask.
1stly, Is Mr. Southey the author of 'Wat Tyler'?
2ndly, Was he not refused a remedy at law by the highest judge of his beloved England, because it was a blasphemous and seditious publication?
3rdly, Was he not entitled by William Smith, in full Parliament, 'a rancorous renegado'?
4thly, Is he...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than
my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book
itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To
another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced
our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the
two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with
these works will immediat...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...t then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day --
And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.
Unification
I'll leave your quiet yard and your white house -
Let life be empty and with light complete.
I'll sing the glory to you in my verse
Like not one woman has sung glory yet.
And that dear girlfriend you remember
In heaven you created for her sight,
I'm trading product tha...Read more of this...
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