Famous A Letter Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Letter is a joy of Earth --

by Emily Dickinson
 A Letter is a joy of Earth --
It is denied the Gods --...Read more of this...

A Familiar Letter

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 YES, write, if you want to, there's nothing like trying;
Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold?
I'll show you that rhyming's as easy as lying,
If you'll listen to me while the art I unfold.

Here's a book full of words; one can choose as he fancies,
As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool;
Just think! all the poems...Read more of this...

By a flower -- By a letter

by Emily Dickinson
 By a flower -- By a letter --
By a nimble love --
If I weld the Rivet faster --
Final fast -- above --

Never mind my breathless Anvil!
Never mind Repose!
Never mind the sooty faces
Tugging at the Forge!...Read more of this...

Going to him! Happy letter!

by Emily Dickinson
"Going to him! Happy letter! Tell him--
Tell him the page I didn't write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.

Tell him just how the fingers hurried
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow-
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.

"Tell him it wasn't a practised writer,
You...Read more of this...

A Letter to Lady Margaret Cavendish Holles-Harley when a Child

by Matthew Prior
 MY noble, lovely, little Peggy, 
Let this my First Epistle beg ye, 
At dawn of morn, and close of even, 
To lift your heart and hands to Heaven. 
In double duty say your prayer: 
Our Father first, then Notre Pere. 

And, dearest child, along the day, 
In every thing you do and say, 
Obey and please my lord and...Read more of this...

Four-Letter Word

by James A Emanuel
 Four-letter word JAZZ:
naughty, sexy, cerebral,
but solarplexy....Read more of this...

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

by Robert Bly
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around I will waste more time....Read more of this...

A Letter to a Live Poet

by Rupert Brooke
 Sir, since the last Elizabethan died,
Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse,
Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious
Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine,
Has, on the world's most noblest chord of song,
Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate
With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day,
Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice
And serene unterrance of old. We heard
--...Read more of this...

A Letter From the Trenches to a School Friend

by Charles Sorley
 I have not brought my Odyssey
With me here across the sea;
But you'll remember, when I say
How, when they went down Sparta way,
To sandy Sparta, long ere dawn
Horses were harnessed, rations drawn,
Equipment polished sparkling bright,
And breakfasts swallowed (as the white
Of eastern heavens turned to gold) -
The dogs barked, swift farewells were told.
The sun springs up, the horses neigh,
Crackles the whip...Read more of this...

Letter

by Victor Hugo
 You can see it already: chalks and ochers; 
Country crossed with a thousand furrow-lines;
Ground-level rooftops hidden by the shrubbery; 
Sporadic haystacks standing on the grass;
Smoky old rooftops tarnishing the landscape; 
A river (not Cayster or Ganges, though:
A feeble Norman salt-infested watercourse); 
On the right, to the north, bizarre terrain
All angular--you'd think a shovel did it. 
So that's the foreground....Read more of this...

Letter to N.Y

by Elizabeth Bishop
for Louise crane


In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look...Read more of this...

Letter From Haworth

by Barry Tebb
 Poems do not always satisfy the soul,

The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more

Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas

Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarm?.

I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea

With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped

Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of...Read more of this...

Letter to an Archaeologist

by Joseph Brodsky
Citizen enemy mama's boy sucker utter
garbage panhandler swine refujew verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes we have dwelt here: in this concrete brick wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed barbed tangled or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that...Read more of this...

Letter In November

by Sylvia Plath
 Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching...Read more of this...

Letter to S.S. from Mametz Wood

by Robert Graves
 I never dreamed we’d meet that day 
In our old haunts down Fricourt way, 
Plotting such marvellous journeys there 
For jolly old “Apr?s-la-guerre.” 

Well, when it’s over, first we’ll meet 
At Gweithdy Bach, my country seat 
In Wales, a curious little shop 
With two rooms and a roof on top, 
A sort of Morlancourt-ish billet 
That never needs a...Read more of this...

Letter I

by Barry Tebb
 Go seek Prince Charming in another place,

His is one face I shall not wear again

You would not have the stars for diadem....Read more of this...

Letter To Kizer From Seattle

by Richard Hugo
 Dear Condor: Much thanks for that telephonic support
from North Carolina when I suddenly went ape
in the Iowa tulips. Lord, but I'm ashamed.
I was afraid, it seemed, according to the doctor
of impending success, winning some poetry prizes
or getting a wet kiss. The more popular I got,
the softer the soft cry in my head: Don't believe them.
You were never good. Then...Read more of this...

This is my letter to the World

by Emily Dickinson
 This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me --
The simple News that Nature told --
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see --
For love of Her -- Sweet -- countrymen --
Judge tenderly -- of Me...Read more of this...

Her Letter

by Robert William Service
 "I'm taking pen in hand this night, and hard it is for me;
My poor old fingers tremble so, my hand is stiff and slow,
And even with my glasses on I'm troubled sore to see. . . .
You'd little know your mother, boy; you'd little, little know.
You mind how brisk and bright I was, how straight and trim and smart;
'Tis...Read more of this...

The River-Merchants Wife: A Letter

by Ezra Pound
 After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight 
 across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling
 flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
 horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with
 blue plums. 
And we went on living in the village of 
 Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or 
 suspicion. 

At fourteen I married My Lord...Read more of this...

Open Letter To Andy C

by Barry Tebb
 Sorry, Writer in Residence on the Great North Run

The last thing I’d ever do is listen to your spin

“You risk losing potential allies in your war

 against the philistines,

Astley, Armitage, Duffy, Sansom, unashamedly provincial,

Defiantly Un-Oxbridge, not the enemy!”



Sorry, Andy, ****-licking's not to my taste.

I always thought it wasn’t yours, my mistake!...Read more of this...

A Letter

by Anthony Hecht
 I have been wondering
 What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
 It is certainly not me.
 But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
 Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.

 Of course, it is talking of you.
 At dawn, where the ocean has netted its...Read more of this...

A Letter to Her Husband

by Anne Bradstreet
 Absent upon Public Employment 

My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,
My joy, my magazine, of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
So many steps, head from the heart to sever,
If but a neck, soon should we be together.
I, like the Earth this season, mourn in...Read more of this...

Letter to My Lover After Seven Years

by Erica Jong
 You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.

You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.

Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of...Read more of this...

A Letter

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dear Miss Lucy: I been t'inkin' dat I 'd write you long fo' dis,
But dis writin' 's mighty tejous, an' you know jes' how it is.
But I 's got a little lesure, so I teks my pen in han'
Fu' to let you know my feelin's since I retched dis furrin' lan'.
I 's right well, I 's glad to tell you...Read more of this...

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