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Famous Erie Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...sources of perpetual snow, 
Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa, 
Some to Atlantica’s bays, and so to the great salt brine. 

In you whoe’er you are my book perusing, 
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing, 
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

Currents for starting a continent new, 
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, 
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pe...Read more of this...



by Sandburg, Carl
...rl—she played once under a crab-apple tree in June and the blossoms fell on the dark hair.

It was somewhere on the Erie line and the town was Salamanca or Painted Post or Horse’s Head.
And out of her hair she shook the blossoms and went into the house and her mother washed her face and her mother had an ache in her heart at a rebel voice, “I don’t want to.”

Somebody’s little girl—forty little girls of somebodies splashed in red tights forming horseshoes, arches,...Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...er ice
and the poisonous marshes

make (if you dare) a better world

(b) expect poison from standing water
  (iii)
lake erie
why not as a joke one night
pick up your bed and walk
to washington – sleep
your damned sleep in its streets
so that one bright metallic morning
it can wake up to the stench
and fermentation of flesh
the gutrot of nerves – the blood’s
green effervescence so active
your skin has a job to keep it all in

isn’t that what things with the palsy
are supposed ...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...bleach the little
 Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
 Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
 the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
 & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
 Aeon till it came out clean...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...e at their side?
What danger from a pow'r so vain,
Or union with that splendid train?"


"Alas, great Malcolm cried, experience
Might teach you not to trust appearance.
Here stands, as dress'd by fell Bellona,
The ghost of Continental Money!
Of Dame Necessity descended,
With whom Credulity engender'd:
Though born with constitution frail,
And feeble strength, that soon must fail,
Yet strangely vers'd in magic lore,
And gifted with transforming power.
His skill the weal...Read more of this...



by Sandburg, Carl
...men at tables
 Spill Peloponnesian syllables
 And speak of shovels for street work.
 And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad
 At Painted Post, Horse’s Head, Salamanca....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...e leaps the Lehigh Valley railroad.
Then acres of steel rails, freight cars, smoke,
And then … the blue lake shore
…Erie with Norse blue eyes … and the white sun....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...f the buffalo herds, grazing the plains—the hirsute and
 strong-breasted bull;
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers, experienced—stars, rain, snow, my
 amaze; 
Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones, and the mountainhawk’s, 
And heard at dusk the unrival’d one, the hermit thrush from the
 swamp-cedars, 
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World. 

2Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, 
Eternal progress, the k...Read more of this...

by Twain, Mark
...On the Erie Canal, it was,
All on a summer's day,
I sailed forth with my parents
Far away to Albany.

From out the clouds at noon that day
There came a dreadful storm,
That piled the billows high about,
And filled us with alarm.

A man came rushing from a house,
Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray,
Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,
Snub up while yet you may.<...Read more of this...

by Kilmer, Joyce
...Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for 
a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in 
it.
I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there 
are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowing...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
... 
A little spar of him the size of a finger, 
pointed and speckled as though blood-flaked, 
washed ashore from Lake Erie near Buffalo 
before the rest slipped down the falls out 
into the St. Lawrence. He could be at sea, 
he could be part of an ocean, by now 
he could even be home. This morning I 
rose later than usual in a great house 
full of sunlight, but I believe it came 
down step by step on each wet sheet 
of wooden siding before it crawled 
from the c...Read more of this...

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