Famous Classics Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Classics poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous classics poems. These examples illustrate what a famous classics poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...sure,
To John Hay I took off my hat;
These fellows were right to my measure,
And I've never gone higher than that.
The Classics! Well, most of them bore me,
The Moderns I don't understand;
But I keep Burns, my kinsman before me,
And Kipling, my friend, is at hand.
They taught me my trade as I know it,
Yet though at their feet I have sat,
For God-sake don't call me a poet,
For I've never been guilty of that.
A rhyme-rustler, rugged and shameless,
A Bab Balladeer on the loose...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...s, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house
and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a co...Read more of this...
by
Burnside, John
...the poets of other lands I bring thee not,
Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long,
Nor rhyme—nor the classics—nor perfume of foreign court, or indoor library;
But an odor I’d bring to-day as from forests of pine in the north, in Maine—or
breath
of an Illinois prairie,
With open airs of Virginia, or Georgia, or Tennessee—or from Texas uplands, or
Florida’s glades,
With presentment of Yellowstone’s scenes, or Yosemite;
And murmuring under, pervading all...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...autumn still the swallows fly and fly. Kuang Heng submitted memorials; I've won little praise, Liu Xiang passed on the classics; my wishes are not realised. The schoolmates of my early years mostly are not poor, In the five tomb towns their furs and horses light and fat....Read more of this...
by
Fu, Du
...The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep.
Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant,
Now lettest thou thy servant
Depart in peace.
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
...Read more of this...
by
Pound, Ezra
...Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III
The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Cali...Read more of this...
by
Pound, Ezra
...Dusting my books I spent a busy day:
Not ancient toes, time-hallowed and unread,
but modern volumes, classics in their way,
whose makers now are numbered with the dead;
Men of a generation more than mine,
With whom I tattled, battled and drank wine.
I worshipped them, rejoiced in their success,
Grudging them not the gold that goes with fame.
I thought them near-immortal, I confess,
And naught could dim the glory of each name.
How I perused their pages wit...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
...Read more of this...
by
Pound, Ezra
...ly seemed to go away, but now,
As this new mode questions, are seen to be
Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics
They must decide which side they are on.
Their reticence has undermined
The urban scenery, made its ambiguities
Look willful and tired, the games of an old man.
What we need now is this unlikely
Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed
Castle. Your argument, Francesco,
Had begun to grow stale as no answer
Or answers were forthcoming. If it diss...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...'d made good
Then threw it all away for drink.
Your boxed-up books, texts in five languages
Or six, the well-thumbed classics worn cassettes
Of Bach, Tippett’s ‘Knot Garden’, invitation
Cards, the total waste, my own and your’s and her’s.
Love does not seem an answer
That you want to know,
The hours, the years of waiting
Gather loss on loss until
My hopes are brief as days
That rush and go like speeding trains
That never stop. You drink, I pay,
You ramble through...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...figures fail to tell me
How far the Village lies --
Whose peasants are the Angels --
Whose Cantons dot the skies --
My Classics veil their faces --
My faith that Dark adores --
Which from its solemn abbeys
Such ressurection pours....Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...round those sordid alleys and bazaars and ask for toddy
If it’s still the same and say it in a tongue they know.
The Classics books lay everywhere around the flat, so many that my mind
Grew numb. Heavy, dusty dictionaries of Mandarin and Greek,
Crumbling Victorian commentaries where every men and de was weighed
And weighed again, and then, through a scholar’s gloss on Aristotle,
That single sentence glowed, ‘And thus we see nobility of soul
Comes only with the conquer...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...gle day. When she sat on the English lawn Park Honan
Flew paper aeroplanes with messages down and
And when she was in Classics they took away her chair
So she sat on the floor reading Virgil and the Chairman of the
Department sent her an official Christmas card
'For six weeks on the university lawn, learning the
Hebrew alphabet'.
And that was just the beginning: in Oxford Magdalen College
School turned our son away for the Leeds protest so she
Started again, in M...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
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