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Famous Diet Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
..., it's as well to he quiet
If you've nothing you think is worth saying in prose,
As to furnish a meal of their cannibal diet
To the critics, by publishing, as you propose.

But it's all of no use, and I'm sorry I've written,--
I shall see your thin volume some day on my shelf;
For the rhyming tarantula surely has bitten,
And music must cure you, so pipe it yourself....Read more of this...



by Wilmot, John
...wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and ****.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
Wh...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...and its frog 
sits on my lips and defecates. 
It is old. It is also a pauper. 
I have tried to keep it on a diet. 
I give it no unction. 

There is a good look that I wear 
like a blood clot. I have 
sewn it over my left breast. 
I have made a vocation of it. 
Lust has taken plant in it 
and I have placed you and your 
child at its milk tip. 

Oh the blackness is murderous 
and the milk tip is brimming 
and each machine is working 
and I wi...Read more of this...

by Piercy, Marge
...ng.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs. 

She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up. 

In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
T...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...s bad
there's more chance
he'll stay that way,
or if he's good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed
by
children
age
diet
conversation
sex
the moon
the absence or
presence of sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
where a man can become
stronger
by being hated. 
I am drinking tonight in Spangler's Bar
and I remember the cows
I once painted in Art class
and they looked good
they looked better than anything
in here. I am drinking in Sp...Read more of this...



by Pope, Alexander
...he good man heaps up nothing but mere metre,
Enjoys his garden and his book in quiet;
And then--a perfect hermit in his diet.
Of little use the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose:
Yet let me show, a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state.
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place,
And speak in public with some sort of gr...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...is, a sweeping arc, 
 We traversed; outward o'er the surface dark 
 Still gazing, at the choking shades who took 
 That diet for their wrath. Till livelier look 
 Was forward drawn, for where at last we came 
 A great tower fronted, and a beacon's flame. 





Canto VIII 



 I SAY, while yet from that tower's base afar, 
 We saw two flames of sudden signal rise, 
 And further, like a small and distant star, 
 A beacon answered. 
 "What before us lies? 
 Who signa...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...erased
Amusing dialog,
As gas has replaced
The crackling firelog.
All that glitters is sold as gold,
And our daily diet grows odder and odder,
And breakfast foods are dusty and cold -
It's a wise child
That knows its fodder.
Someone invented the automobile,
And good Americans took the wheel
To view American rivers and rills
And justly famous forests and hills -
But someone equally enterprising
Had invented billboard advertising.
You linger at home
In dark despair...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...nlike your majesty:
He made no wars, and did not gain
New realms to lose them back again;
And (save debates in Warsaw's diet)
He reigned in most unseemly quiet;
Not that he had no cares to vex,
He loved the muses and the sex;
And sometimes these so froward are,
They made him wish himself at war;
But soon his wrath being o'er, he took
Another mistress - or new book;
And then he gave prodigious fetes -
All Warsaw gathered round his gates
To gaze upon his splendid court,
And dam...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed ou...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...nvert, as you 
To proper substance. Time may come, when Men 
With Angels may participate, and find 
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare; 
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps 
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, 
Improved by tract of time, and, winged, ascend 
Ethereal, as we; or may, at choice, 
Here or in heavenly Paradises dwell; 
If ye be found obedient, and retain 
Unalterably firm his love entire, 
Whose progeny you are. Mean while enjoy 
Your...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...Hayman to fix it.

 Your fences are on fire?

 Get Mr. Hayman to put them out.

 Mr.- Hayman lived on a diet of stone-ground wheat and

kale. He bought the wheat by the hundred-pound sack and

ground it himself with a mortar and pestle. He grew the kale

in front of his shack and tended the kale as if it were prize

winning orchids.

 During all the time that was his life, Mr. Hayman never

had a cup of coffee, a smoke, a drink or a woman and t...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...the feasters gluttonous feast? 
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors? 
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, Pioneers! O pioneers! 

25
 Has the night descended? 
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged, nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you, in your tracks to pause oblivious, Pioneers! O pioneers!


26
 Till with sound of trumpet, 
Far, far off the day-break call—hark! how loud and clear I he...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...thing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay --
the man you knew yesterday hooking
for ten rounds or drinking for three days and
three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross
or a stone or under an e...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...all of battle—I nourish active rebellion; 
He going with me must go well arm’d; 
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. 

17
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well. 

Allons! be not detain’d! 
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d! 
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d! 
Let the school stand! mind not the c...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...r a soldier camp’d, or carrying my knapsack and gun—or a miner in
 California;
Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the
 spring; 
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, 
Far from the clank of crowds, intervals passing, rapt and happy; 
Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri—aware of mighty
 Niagara; 
Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains—the hirsute and
 strong-breasted bull;
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowe...Read more of this...

by Swift, Jonathan
...hat he's the nightingale of brutes.

The swine with contrite heart allow'd,
His shape and beauty made him proud:
In diet was perhaps too nice,
But gluttony was ne'er his vice:
In ev'ry turn of life content,
And meekly took what fortune sent:
Inquire through all the parish round,
A better neighbour ne'er was found:
His vigilance might some displease;
'Tis true he hated sloth like peas.

The mimic ape began his chatter,
How evil tongues his life bespatter:
Much of the c...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...Serapion, Rasis, and Avicen;
Averrois, Damascene, and Constantin;
Bernard, and Gatisden, and Gilbertin. 
Of his diet measurable was he,
For it was of no superfluity,
But of great nourishing, and digestible.
His study was but little on the Bible.
In sanguine* and in perse** he clad was all *red **blue
Lined with taffeta, and with sendall*. *fine silk
And yet *he was but easy of dispense*: *he spent very little*
He kept *that he won in the pestilence*. *...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...e new and good names—of the modern developments—of inalienable homesteads; 
Of a free and original life there—of simple diet and clean and sweet blood; 
Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there; 
Of immense spiritual results, future years, far west, each side of the Anahuacs; 
Of these leaves, well understood there, (being made for that area;)
Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there; 
(O it lurks in me night and day—What is gain, after all,...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...your doves about you flit,
And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee,
Or on your head their rosy feet,
As if they knew your diet spares
Whatever moved in that full sheet
Let down to Peter at his prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,
- And seem'd at first "a thing enskied,"
As Shakespeare has it, airy-light
To float above the ways of men,
Then fell from that half-spiritual height
Chill'd, till I tasted flesh aga...Read more of this...

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