Famous Fiction Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Fiction poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fiction poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fiction poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day,
Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm,
Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate
Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said
You're all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he
She went from being an Ivy League professor of French
To...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
This is the yarn he told me
As we sat in Casey's Bar,
That Rooshun mug who scammed from the jug
In the Land of the Crimson Star;
That Soviet guy with the single eye,
And the face like a flaming scar.
Where Lenin lies the red flag flies, and the rat-grey workers wait
To tread the gloom of Lenin's Tomb,...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
O my heart! since the foundation, even, of the things
of this world is only a fiction, why do you venture thus
in an infinite gulf of sorrow? Trust yourself to destiny,
endure the evil, for the lot which the heavenly brush
has traced for you will not be effaced.
333...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
HOW wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite,
How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white,
How Genius, th’ illustrious father of fiction,
Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction,
I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle,
I care not, not I—let the Critics go whistle!
But now for a Patron whose name and whose glory,
At once may illustrate and honour...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
Drink of this cup; -- you'll find there's a spell in
Its every drop 'gainst the ills of mortality;
Talk of the cordial that sparkled for Helen;
Her cup was a fiction, but this is reality.
Would you forget the dark world we are in
Just taste of the bubble that gleams on the top of it;
But would...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to Livia's rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula's dissolving pile.
And each ranked ruin tended to beguile
The outer sense, and shape itself as though
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.
When lo, swift hands,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Peace is a fiction of our Faith --
The Bells a Winter Night
Bearing the Neighbor out of Sound
That never did alight....Read more of this...
by
Robert Lowell
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Ph?dre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too...Read more of this...
by
C S Lewis
By and by Man will try
To get out into the sky,
Sailing far beyond the air
From Down and Here to Up and There.
Stars and sky, sky and stars
Make us feel the prison bars.
Suppose it done. Now we ride
Closed in steel, up there, outside
Through our port-holes see the vast
Heaven-scape go rushing past.
Shall...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
As often as he let himself be seen
We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored
The inscrutable profusion of the Lord
Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean—
Who made him human when he might have been
A rat, and so been wholly in accord
With any other creature we abhorred
As always useless and not...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
All that this world contains are but images and flourishes
of fiction. Ill-advised is he who does not comprehend
his place in the number of these images. Repose,
thou, friend, drink a cup of wine, give thyself up to joy
and thus be delivered from all these vain figures, from
these impossible reflections [which come to assail thy
mind].
343...Read more of this...
by
Derek Walcott
Koening knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles
coated with coal dust. Staying aboard, he saw, up
in a thick meadow, a sand-colored mule,
untethered, with no harness, and no signs
of habitation round the ruined factory wheel
locked hard in rust,...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
whose beat lies naked on a table
not to score in triumph on a line
no sensitive would put a nostril to
but simply to receive it as an
offering glimpsing the sacred there
poem probes the poet's once-intention
but each time said budges its truth
afresh (leaving...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Gray
Pindaric Ode
"Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Tho' fanned by Conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail,
Nor e'en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,
From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!"
Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay,
As down the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:
So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,
Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either-
You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads
Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine
Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and...Read more of this...
by
John Montague
I'll tell you a sore truth, little understood
It's harder to leave, than to be left:
To stay, to leave, both sting wrong.
You will always have me to blame,
Can dream we might have sailed on;
From absence's rib, a warm fiction.
To tear up old love by the roots,
To trample on past affections:
There is no music for so harsh a song....Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
Chill penury repress'd his noble rage,
And froze the genial current of his soul.
GRAY.
IF GRIEF can deprecate the wrath of Heaven,
Or human frailty hope to be forgiven !
Ere now thy sainted spirit bends its way
To the bland regions of celestial day;
Ere now, thy soul, immers'd in purest air
Smiles at the triumphs of supreme...Read more of this...
by
C S Lewis
Against too many writers of science fiction
Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies
If at the journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I think to Live -- may be a Bliss
To those who dare to try --
Beyond my limit to conceive --
My lip -- to testify --
I think the Heart I former wore
Could widen -- till to me
The Other, like the little Bank
Appear -- unto the Sea --
I think the Days -- could every one
In Ordination stand --
And Majesty -- be...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn L Taylor
A reflection on my students
They are so beautiful, and so very young
they seem almost to glitter with perfection,
these creatures that I briefly move among.
I never get to stay with them for long,
but even so, I view them with affection:
they are so beautiful, and so very young.
Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung,
they’re expert in the art of introspection,
these creatures...Read more of this...
by
Jorge Luis Borges
A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Whatever in Philoclea the fair
Or the discreet Pamela figur'd are,
Change but the name the virtues are your owne,
And for a fiction there a truth is knowne:
If any service here perform'd you see,
If duty and affection paynted bee
Within these leaves: may you be pleas'd to know
They only shadow what I truly owe
To your desart: thus I a glasse have sent
Which...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth, it surely is most fit
[Logic and common usage so commanding]
In thy own book that first thy name be writ,
Zeno and other sages notwithstanding;
And I have other reasons for so doing
Besides my innate love of contradiction;
Each poet - if a poet - in pursuing
The muses thro' their bowers of Truth or Fiction,
Has studied very little of his part,
Read nothing,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Southey
And I was once like this! that glowing cheek
Was mine, those pleasure-sparkling eyes, that brow
Smooth as the level lake, when not a breeze
Dies o'er the sleeping surface! twenty years
Have wrought strange alteration! Of the friends
Who once so dearly prized this miniature,
And loved it for its likeness, some are gone
To their last home; and some, estranged in heart,
Beholding me with...Read more of this...
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