Famous Importance Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Importance poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous importance poems. These examples illustrate what a famous importance poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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An Essay On Criticism

...ity should find,
Tho' Wit and Art conspire to move your Mind;
But Dulness with Obscenity must prove
As Shameful sure as Importance in Love.
In the fat Age of Pleasure, Wealth, and Ease,
Sprung the rank Weed, and thriv'd with large Increase;
When Love was all an easie Monarch's Care;
Seldom at Council, never in a War:
Jilts rul'd the State, and Statesmen Farces writ;
Nay Wits had Pensions, and young Lords had Wit:
The Fair sate panting at a Courtier's Play,
And not a Mask went...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander


Epic

...ortin
Til Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance....Read more of this...
by Kavanagh, Patrick

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...leating flocks from the seaside,
Where was their favorite pasture. Behind them followed the watch-dog,
Patient, full of importance, and grand in the pride of his instinct,
Walking from side to side with a lordly air, and superbly
Waving his bushy tail, and urging forward the stragglers;
Regent of flocks was he when the shepherd slept; their protector,
When from the forest at night, through the starry silence, the wolves howled.
Late, with the rising moon, returned the wains f...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

...e past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, n...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

...e punished under a foreign code of conscience.The words of a dead manAre modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrowWhen the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,A few thousand will think of this dayAs one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we ha...Read more of this...
by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)


Lesson In Grammar

...paid.

It is just the same when constructing a sentence
But here we must be very careful
And lay stress on the extreme importance
Of defining our terms: nothing is as simple
As it seems at first regard.
"Sentence" might well mean to you
The amorous rope or twelve years" hard.

No, by "sentence" we mean, quite simply, words
Put together like the parts of a machine.
Now remember we must have a verb: verbs
Are words of action like Murder, Love, or Sin.
But these might be nouns,...Read more of this...
by Scannell, Vernon

London Bridge

...o, I’m not a devil, I’m a prophet— 
One who sees the end already of so much that one end more 
Would have now the small importance of one other small illusion, 
Which in turn would have a welcome where the rest have gone before.
But if I were you, my fancy would look on a little farther 
For the glimpse of a release that may be somewhere still in sight. 
Furthermore, you must remember those two hundred invitations 
For the dancing after dinner. We shall have to shine tonight....Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Proclamation Without Pretension

...muezzins

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence 
or appearance

MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS 
BLIND MEN take the stage

THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick

ART NEEDS AN OPERATION

Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO

We are in sea...Read more of this...
by Tzara, Tristan

Salmon

...nce, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the eye
is helpless
when the image forms itself, upside-down, back...Read more of this...
by Graham, Jorie

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...e of ideal beauty," because
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left. Now their importance
If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish
A dream which includes them all, as they are
Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.
They seemed strange because we couldn't actually see them.
And we realize this only at a point where they lapse
Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
Th...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

The Deserted Village

...dours! Could not all
Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!
Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart
An hour's importance to the poor man's heart;
Thither no more the peasant shall repair
To sweet oblivion of his daily care;
No more the farmer's news, the barber's tale,
No more the woodman's ballad shall prevail;
No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear,
Relax his ponderous strength, and lean to hear;
The host himself no longer shall be found
Careful to see the m...Read more of this...
by Goldsmith, Oliver

The Rape of the Lock

...reen,
Or Virgins visited by Angel-Pow'rs,
With Golden Crowns and Wreaths of heav'nly Flowers,
Hear and believe! thy own Importance know,
Nor bound thy narrow Views to Things below.
Some secret Truths from Learned Pride conceal'd,
To Maids alone and Children are reveal'd:
What tho' no Credit doubting Wits may give?
The Fair and Innocent shall still believe. 
Know then, unnumbered Spirits round thee fly,
The light Militia of the lower Sky;
These, tho' unseen, are ever on the Wi...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander

The Retired Cat

...d:MORAL


Beware of too sublime a sense
Of your own worth and consequence.
The man who dreams himself so great,
And his importance of such weight,
That all around in all that's done
Must move and act for him alone,
Will learn in school of tribulation
The folly of his expectation....Read more of this...
by Cowper, William

The Revolutionary

...tired of the limitations of their Infinite. 
I am so sick of the pretensions of the Spirit. 
I am so weary of pale-face importance. 

Am I not blind, at the round-turning mill? 
Then why should I fear their pale faces? 
Or love the effulgence of their holy light, 
The sun of their righteousness? 

To me, all faces are dark, 
All lips are dusky and valved. 

Save your lips, O pale-faces, 
Which are slips of metal, 
Like slits in an automatic-machine, you columns of give-and-ta...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

The Self-Seeker

...es the Boston lawyer 
A little barefoot girl who in the noise 
Of heavy footsteps in the old frame house, 
And baritone importance of the lawyer, 
Stood for a while unnoticed with her hands 
Shyly behind her. 
"Well, and how is Mister----" 
The lawyer was already in his satchel 
As if for papers that might bear the name 
He hadn't at command. "You must excuse me, 
I dropped in at the mill and was detained." 
"Looking round, I suppose," said Willis. 
"Yes, 
Well, yes." 
"Hear ...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

The Silent Shepherds

...untry news into supernaturalism--
For all men to such minds are devils or gods--and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.
 I will have no lawyers nor constables
Each man guard his own goods: there will be manslaughter,
But no more wars, no more mass-sacrifice. Nor I'll have no doctors,
Except old women gathering herbs on the mountain,
Let each have her sack of opium to ease the death-pains.


That would be a good world, free and ou...Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson

The Story Of Our Lives

...ugs, the furniture,
seem almost imaginary now.
"She continued to read.
She seemed to consider his absence
of no special importance,
as someone on a perfect day will consider
the weather a failure
because it did not change his mind."
You narrow your eyes.
You have the impulse to close the book
which describes my resistance:
how when I lean back I imagine
my life without you, imagine moving
into another life, another book.
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momenta...Read more of this...
by Strand, Mark

The Waste Land

...ron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears."
308. The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon (which
corresponds
in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken,
will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism
in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one
of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.
309. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The
collocation
of these two representatives of easter...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

The White Cliffs

...Englishman's code of taking and giving
Rights and privileges pre-ordained,
Based since English life began
On the prime importance of being a man.

IX 
And what a voice he had-gentle, profound, 
Clear masculine!—I melted at the sound. 
Oh, English voices, are there any words 
Those tones to tell, those cadences to teach! 
As song of thrushes is to other birds, 
So English voices are to other speech; 
Those pure round 'o's '—those lovely liquid 'l's' 
Ring in the ears like sou...Read more of this...
by Miller, Alice Duer

Tunbridge Wells

...ssage,
He'd find but small effects of such a message.
Listening, I found the cob of all this rabble
Pert Bays, with his importance comfortable.
He, being raised to an archdeaconry
By trampling on religion, liberty,
Was grown to great, and looked too fat and jolly,
To be disturbed with care and melancholy,
Though Marvell has enough exposed his folly.
He drank to carry off some old remains
His lazy dull distemper left in 's veins.
Let him drink on, but 'tis not a whole flood
Ca...Read more of this...
by Wilmot, John

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