Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Generation Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...flower 
on her forehead to cover the curl 
of when she was good and when she was... 
And where she was begat 
and in a generation 
the third she will beget, 
me, 
with the stranger's seed blooming 
into the flower called Horrid. 

I walk in a yellow dress 
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes, 
enough pills, my wallet, my keys, 
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five? 
I walk. I walk. 
I hold matches at street signs 
for it is dark, 
as dark as the leathery de...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne



...o hid themselves 
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave 
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived 
The generation born with them, nor seemed 
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks 
Around them;---and there have been holy men 
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. 
But let me often to these solitudes 
Retire, and in thy presence reassure 
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies, 
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink 
And tremble and are...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen
...who hid themselves 
Deep in the woody wilderness and gave 
Their lives to thought and prayer till they outlived 
The generation born with them nor seemed 
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks 95 
Around them;¡ªand there have been holy men 
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. 
But let me often to these solitudes 
Retire and in thy presence reassure 
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies 100 
The passions at thy plainer footsteps shrink 
And tremble and a...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen
...smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

 V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

 VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of thi...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler
...talent.

We, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism.
We, whose cunning is not unlike despair.

A new, humorless generation is now arising
It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

5
Let your words speak not through their meanings
But through them against whom they are used.

Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words.
Consign clear words to lexical limbo.

Judge no words before the clerks have checked
In their card index by whom they were spoken.

The v...Read more of this...
by Milosz, Czeslaw



...e of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

 In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van p...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...h transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

 If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night li...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-wat...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...weed; 
Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 45 
When old age shall this generation waste  
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe 
Than ours a friend to man to whom thou say'st  
'Beauty is truth truth beauty ¡ªthat is all 
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.' 50 ...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...uce new Worlds; whereof so rife 
There went a fame in Heaven that he ere long 
Intended to create, and therein plant 
A generation whom his choice regard 
Should favour equal to the Sons of Heaven. 
Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps 
Our first eruption--thither, or elsewhere; 
For this infernal pit shall never hold 
Celestial Spirits in bondage, nor th' Abyss 
Long under darkness cover. But these thoughts 
Full counsel must mature. Peace is despaired; 
For who can thin...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...teep; suspense in Heaven, 
Held by thy voice, thy potent voice, he hears, 
And longer will delay to hear thee tell 
His generation, and the rising birth 
Of Nature from the unapparent Deep: 
Or if the star of evening and the moon 
Haste to thy audience, Night with her will bring, 
Silence; and Sleep, listening to thee, will watch; 
Or we can bid his absence, till thy song 
End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine. 
Thus Adam his illustrious guest besought: 
And thus the Go...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...half,
Who once set Purgatory Hill in doubt.

Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere,
Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation,
And mummied housegods in their musty niches,
Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,
And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,
No pride but pride of pelf. Long since the young
Fought in great bloody battles to carve out
This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf,
Montrose, Mackail, Argyle, perverse and brave,
Twisted the stream, unhooped th...Read more of this...
by Muir, Edwin
...nable.

With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop, 
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions; 
One generation playing its part, and passing on; 
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn, 
With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me, to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me, 

3Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian; 
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses! 
For you a programme of chants. 

Chants of the prairie...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...

PLATE 15
A Memorable Fancy

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which
knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the
rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of Dragons were
hollowing the cave, 
In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the 
cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and precious
stones.
In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of
air...Read more of this...
by Blake, William
...and your statues 
Reared, sung to, when, this gad-fly brushed aside, 
We plant a solid foot into the Time, 
And mould a generation strong to move 
With claim on claim from right to right, till she 
Whose name is yoked with children's, know herself; 
And Knowledge in our own land make her free, 
And, ever following those two crownèd twins, 
Commerce and conquest, shower the fiery grain 
Of freedom broadcast over all the orbs 
Between the Northern and the Southern morn.' 

Then...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...tails of alcohol and drugs, the quarrels with knives and guns

Entered into as lightly as love was once with us.



Our generation awaits the taste of death

With none of the anticipated solace,

No children’s children visiting in spite of the spare room

Stacked with toys, with shelves of dusty books, Baum’s ‘Magical Land of Oz’

Its spine laid bare, Mombi the witch, Dorothy and Toto

Gathered forlornly round the saw-horse, the scarlet and crimson

Of their Edwardian rig sli...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...g. 
Which seem'd to hold all verse in detestation; 
The angels had of course enough of song 
When upon service; and the generation 
Of ghosts had heard too much in life, not long 
Before, to profit by a new occasion; 
The monarch, mute till then, exclaim'd, 'What! What! 
Pye come again? No more — no more of that!' 

XCIII 

The tumult grew; an universal cough 
Convulsed the skies, as during a debate 
When Castlereagh has been up long enough 
(Before he was first minister of s...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...n of the poem worth the trouble. To
another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced
our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the
two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with
these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to
vegetation ceremonies.
 Macmillan Cambridge.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel 2:1.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.
31. V. Tristan und ...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ine age
In th' acts and in the fruits of marriage.
Tell me also, to what conclusion* *end, purpose
Were members made of generation,
And of so perfect wise a wight* y-wrought? *being
Trust me right well, they were not made for nought.
Glose whoso will, and say both up and down,
That they were made for the purgatioun
Of urine, and of other thinges smale,
And eke to know a female from a male:
And for none other cause? say ye no?
Experience wot well it is not so.
So that the cler...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace....Read more of this...
by Amichai, Yehuda

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Generation poems.


Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry