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Famous Evolution Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...God to be a rule unto thyself. 

(Lo! where arise three peerless stars, 
To be thy natal stars, my country—Ensemble—Evolution—Freedom,
Set in the sky of Law.) 

Land of unprecedented faith—God’s faith! 
Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav’d; 
The general inner earth, so long, so sedulously draped over, now and hence for what it is,
 boldly laid bare, 
Open’d by thee to heaven’s light, for benefit or bale.

Not for success alone; 
Not to fair-sail unintermitted ...Read more of this...



by Dunn, Stephen
...jump up and down 
for Jesus. 
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain 
about what's comic, what's serious. 

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. 
You can't say to your child 
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks 
of extinction and nothing 

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have 
a wonderful story for my child 
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car 
she sang the songs, 

occasionally standing up for Jesus. 
There was ...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...spirit in its progress, still 
Losing true life for ever and a day 
Through ever trying to be and ever being-- 
In the evolution of successive spheres-- 
Before its actual sphere and place of life, 
Halfway into the next, which having reached, 
It shoots with corresponding foolery 


Halfway into the next still, on and off! 
As when a traveller, bound from North to South, 
Scouts fur in Russia: what's its use in France? 
In France spurns flannel: where's its need in Spain? 
...Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...tyranny (in the long blow) lacked the will to break

that heaped-up suffering gave to sufferers a balm
and through such evolution (such dog-eared mystery)
there would grow an end to the strong is right mystique
and that ordinariness unarmed (however weak its knee)
could hymn its own upstanding (as honoured as a psalm)

i believed in flower-power (the triumph of the meek)
though evidence was mocking (less song than threnody)
i savoured the impossible without a qualm

(ii)
and ...Read more of this...

by Kizer, Carolyn
...When from his cave, young Mao in his youthful mind
A work to renew old China first designed,
Then he alone interpreted the law,
and from tradtional fountains scorned to draw:
But when to examine every part he came,
Marx and Confucius turned out much the same....Read more of this...



by Ashbery, John
...ospitals.
"It's all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing
Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?"
Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Sélysette: "If his
Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others, 
What's keeping us here? Why not leave at once?
I have to stay here while they sit in there,
Laugh, drink, have fine time. In my day
One lay under the tough green leaves,
Pretending not to notice how they bled into
The sky's aqua, t...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...te your death
By straying on my bath-room floor?"
"It is because," said he (or she),
"Adventure is my destiny.

"By evolution I was planned,
And marvellously made as you;
And I am led to understand
The selfsame God conceived us two:
Sire, though the coup de grâce you give,
Even a roach has right to live."

Said I: "Of course you have a right,--
But not to blot my bath-room floor.
Yet though with slipper I may smite,
Your doom I morally deplore . . .
Fr...Read more of this...

by John, Sharmagne Leland-St
...I swim near summer shadows
glide over dappled shoals
keeping to the fluid shallows
reminiscent of the womb 
where I learned to swallow 
gulps 
of tantalising air

in the amniotic sac
where I shed scales 
preferring skin and 
hanks of auburn hair
upon my head
where I dispensed 
with fins and gills
grew hands and feet
with which to tread
and push away 
from ...Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can neve...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...nd ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, bey...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...the sea,) 
For it, the partial to the permanent flowing, 
For it, the Real to the Ideal tends. 

For it, the mystic evolution;
Not the right only justified—what we call evil also justified. 

Forth from their masks, no matter what, 
From the huge, festering trunk—from craft and guile and tears, 
Health to emerge, and joy—joy universal. 

Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds of men and States, 

Electric,...Read more of this...

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