Famous Alcoholic Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

...et on a foliage tour, one fall, were all people
she no longer saw. She worked for a law firm, said all
 the judges were alcoholic, had never voted.

But would sometimes have me to dinner—breaded veal,
white wine, strawberry Bavarian—and sometimes, from 
what she didn't know she was saying, I'd snatch a shred
or two of her threadbare history. Baltic cold. Being 
sent home in a troika when her feet went numb. In
summer, carriage rides. A swarm of gypsy children 
driven off with...Read more of this...
by Clampitt, Amy


Agnostic Apology

...r can be defined;
And so with theories obscure
I will not mystify my mind;
And though I use it more or less,
Describing alcoholic scenes,
I do not know, I must confess,
 What Spirit means.

When I survey this cosmic scene,
The term "Creator" seems absurd;
The Universe has always been,
Creation never has occurred.
But in my Lexicon of Doubt
It strikes me definitely odd,
One word I never dare to flout,
One syllable the mountains shout,
Three letters that the stars spell out:
 G...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

All My Pretty Ones

...r look at later.


I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept 
for three years, telling all she does not say 
of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept, 
she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day 
with your blood, will I drink down your glass 
of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years 
goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass. 
Only in this hoarded span will love persevere. 
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, 
bend down my strange face to yours and for...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Flee On Your Donkey

...was a long trip with little days in it
and no new places.

In here,
it's the same old crowd,
the same ruined scene.
The alcoholic arrives with his gold culbs.
The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn
into the lining of her dress.
The permanent guests have done nothing new.
Their faces are still small
like babies with jaundice.

Meanwhile,
they carried out my mother,
wrapped like somebody's doll, in sheets,
bandaged her jaw and stuffed up her holes.
My father, too. He went ou...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Incompatabilities

...ad the mortification of lice in your hair

While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.





Four children, an alcoholic father and

An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.

I did not make it like Alan Bennett,

Who still sends funny postcards

About our Leeds childhood.

Of your’s, you could never speak

And found my nostalgia

Wholly inappropriate.



Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t ...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry


Jaloppy Joy

...the rapture of the poet.

He's a little invoice clerk,
I'm a worn and ancient flivver;
I have an asthmatic spark,
He an alcoholic liver;
Yet with clatter, clang and creak
We are lyrical for one day;
Then another loathly week,
Living for another Sunday....Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

O We Are The Outcasts

...id. the Polack picks on fags
"fragile fags." the Polack hates his
wife, hates his daughter. his daughter will become
an alcoholic, a prostitute. the Polack has an
"obese burned out wife." the Polack has a
spastic gut. the Polack has a
"rectal brain."

thank you, Doctor (and poet). any charge for
this? I know I still owe you for the
pill.

Your poem is not too good
but at least I got your starch up.
most of your stuff is about as lively as a
wet and deflated
beachball. but it ...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Oh To Be Odd!

...around and work day and night and night and day with
your nose to the sawmill.
If you're nawmill.

Note: Dipsomaniac -- alcoholic...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

The Ballad Of The Ice-Worm Cocktail

...its storm-centre breezed the gallant Major Brown.
And at the apparation, whith its glass eye and plus-fours,
From fifty alcoholic throats responded fifty roars.
With shouts of stark amazement and with whoops of sheer delight,
They surged around the stranger, but the first was Deacon White.
"We welcome you," he cried aloud, "to this the Great White Land.
The Artic Brotherhood is proud to grip you by the hand.
Yea, sportsman of the bull-dog breed, from trails of far away,
To Yu...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

Three Songs For Mayday Morning

...
By ‘JC’. **** you, Jock, you should be ashamed,

Attacking Brenda Williams, who had a background

Worse than yours, an alcoholic schizophrenic father

And an Irish immigrant mother who died when Brenda was fifteen

But still she managed to read Proust on her day off

As a library girl, turned down by David Jenkins,

‘As rising star of the left’ for a place at Leeds

To read theology started her as a protest poet

Sitting out on the English lawn, mistaken for a snow sculpture...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

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