Famous Exhibition Poems by Famous Poets

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

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There is a finished feeling

by Emily Dickinson
 There is a finished feeling
Experienced at Graves --
A leisure of the Future --
A Wilderness of Size.

By Death's bold Exhibition
Preciser what we are
And the Eternal function
Enabled to infer....Read more of this...

Prospect NSW (For Anita Cobby)

by Dale Harcombe
 The hushed dark hugs the streets.
  Somewhere a cat snaps the silence.
  Dogs begin to bark, like a pack
  moving in for the kill.
  Women shrink in their homes.
  Shadows slip
  through the night and
  stars dim their lights
  as cars flash past.
  When they disappear,
  silence, heavy as...Read more of this...

The Man From Athabaska

by Robert William Service
 Oh the wife she tried to tell me that 'twas nothing but the thrumming
 Of a wood-pecker a-rapping on the hollow of a tree;
And she thought that I was fooling when I said it was the drumming
 Of the mustering of legions, and 'twas calling unto me;
 'Twas calling me to pull my freight and hop across the sea.

And...Read more of this...

Lines in Praise of Mr. J. Graham Henderson Hawick

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Success to Mr J. Graham Henderson, who is a good man,
And to gainsay it there's few people can,
I say so from my own experience,
And experience is a great defence. 

He is a good man, I venture to say,
Which I declare to the world without dismay,
Because he's given me a suit of Tweeds, magnificent to see,
So good that it cannot...Read more of this...

Strange Fruit

by Seamus Heaney
 Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes...Read more of this...

Our Lady of the Mine

by Eugene Field
 The Blue Horizon wuz a mine us fellers all thought well uv,
And there befell the episode I now perpose to tell uv;
'T wuz in the year uv sixty-nine,--somewhere along in summer,--
There hove in sight one afternoon a new and curious comer;
His name wuz Silas Pettibone,--a' artist by perfession,--
With a kit of tools and a big mustache and a pipe...Read more of this...

Artist

by Robert William Service
 He gave a picture exhibition,
Hiring a little empty shop.
Above its window: FREE ADMISSION
Cajoled the passers-by to stop;
Just to admire - no need to purchase,
Although his price might have been low:
But no proud artist ever urges
Potential buyers at his show.

Of course he badly needed money,
But more he needed moral aid.
Some people thought his pictures funny,
Too ultra-modern, I'm afraid.
His painting was...Read more of this...

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