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Famous Dictionaries Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...ssus flowes,
And euery flower, not sweet perhaps, which growes
Neere thereabouts, into your poesie wring;
Ye that do dictionaries methode bring
Into your rimes, running in rattling rowes;
You that poore Petrarchs long deceased woes
With new-borne sighes and denisen'd wit do sing;
You take wrong wayes; those far-fet helps be such
As do bewray a want of inward tuch,
And sure, at length stol'n goods doe come to light:
But if, both for your loue and skill, your name
Yo...Read more of this...
by Sidney, Sir Philip



...terms about our fame;
let our
 common monument be
socialism
 built
 in battle.
Men of posterity
 examine the flotsam of dictionaries:
out of Lethe
 will bob up
 the debris of such words
as “prostitution,” 
 “tuberculosis,” 
 “blockade.” 
For you,
 who are now
 healthy and agile,
the poet
 with the rough tongue
 of his posters,
has licked away consumptives’ spittle.
With the tail of my years behind me,
 I begin to resemble
those monsters,
 excavated dinosaurs.
Comrade life,
 l...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...gs of the earth! 
Toward him who sings the songs of the Body, and of the truths of the earth; 
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch. 

14
I swear I see what is better than to tell the best; 
It is always to leave the best untold.

When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot, 
My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, 
My breath will not be obedient to its organs, 
I become a dumb man. 

The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow—all or ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture well.
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here unvalued underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground and never soars,
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars,
Tough and screaming as birch-bark,
Goes like bullet to its mark,
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear:
To student ears kee...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...n 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 conquering of loss’; meaning shimmered in that empty space

Where we believed there was no way to re...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry



...ircles me every time I live a new day 
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word 
You have given me back to the dictionaries 
And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz. 

*** 
The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse 
I did not look 
For the virgins of immortality for I love life 
On earth, amid fig trees and pines, 
But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it 
With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure. 

*** 
The martyr warned me: Do ...Read more of this...
by Darwish, Mahmoud

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry