Famous Absolutes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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November 1968

by Adrienne Rich
 Stripped
you're beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won't hold you
nor the radar aerials

You're what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment
I know nothing about it
my ignorance of you amazes me
now that I watch...Read more of this...

Cosmopolitan Greetings

by Allen Ginsberg
 To Struga Festival Golden Wreath Laureates
 & International Bards 1986

Stand up against governments, against God.

Stay irresponsible.

Say only what we know & imagine.

Absolutes are coercion.

Change is absolute.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.

Observe what's vivid.

Notice what you notice.

Catch yourself thinking.

Vividness is self-selecting.

If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.

Remember the future.

Advise only yourself.

Don't drink yourself to death.

Two molecules clanking against...Read more of this...

Exposure

by Seamus Heaney
 It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy...Read more of this...

The Spirit Wooed

by Philip Larkin
 Once I believed in you,
 And then you came,
 Unquestionably new, as fame
Had said you were. But that was long ago.

You launched no argument,
 Yet I obeyed,
 Straightaway, the instrument you played
Distant Down sidestreets, keeping different time,

And never questioned what
 You fascinate
 In me; if good or not, the state
You pressed towards. There was no need to know.

Grave pristine...Read more of this...

Love Is A Parallax

by Sylvia Plath
 'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
 in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
 where wave pretends to drench real sky.' 

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
 or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of...Read more of this...

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