Famous Adolescent Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Paris

by Alan Seeger
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the means...Read more of this...

Flee On Your Donkey

by Anne Sexton
 Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in...Read more of this...

Welcome Home

by Barry Tebb
 ‘Leeds welcomes you’ in flowers

Garlanding the white stuccoed tower 

Of City Station: red on green

As poetry’s demon seizes me,

Upending all ordures of order.

‘Haworth Moor, Haworth Moor’

Echoes and re-echoes under the Dark Arches

Where the Aire gurgles and swirls

In eddies of Jack the Ripper, cloud-hopping

Jumping Jack Flash but Jack’s the lad I’m not

My adolescent timidity gelding

My desire for the welcoming heavy...Read more of this...

Mornings Like This

by Barry Tebb
 Mornings like this I awaken and wonder

How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little

And yet in essence stayed the same

Always passionate for the unattainable

For Joan Baez to make me her analyst,

To tour Ireland with Eddie and Finbar Furey

To be made a Chevalier des Palmes for translating Milosz.

I remember one road, many roads I did not...Read more of this...

Scars on Paper

by Marilyn Hacker
 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...

Inheritance—His

by Audre Lorde
 I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in...Read more of this...

To Margaret Unforgotten

by Barry Tebb
 Two nights I have dreamed of you

Once as an adolescent, evanescent

Yet tangible still to the spirit’s touch,

Then as a ten year old in the shared 

Secret garden of our imagination....Read more of this...

Plea For A History Of Working-class Leeds

by Barry Tebb
 I want a true history of my city

**** THE DE LACY FAMILY AND DOUBLE

**** JOHN OF GAUNT ESPECIALLY

And all his descendants

With their particular vilenesses -

I met one in the sixties

Who had all the coldness of Himmler

So svelte and adored by the cognoscenti.



I want a history responsive

To the needs of the working-class

One that will minute the back-to-backs

Spread over the city...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Adolescent poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace