Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Hackneyed Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...air?
And wherefore deck thy youthful form
With such unwearied care? 
'Tell us ­- and cease to tire our ears
With yonder hackneyed strain ­-
Why wilt thou play those simple tunes
So often o'er again?'
'Nay, gentle friends, I can but say
That childhood's thoughts are gone.
Each year its own new feelings brings
And years move swiftly on, 

And for these little simple airs,
I love to play them o'er ­-
So much I dare not promise now
To play them never more.'
I answered and it was ...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Anne



...The puppet-booth of fun.

Our powers, perhaps, are small to please,
But even *****-songs and castanettes,
Old jokes and hackneyed repartees
Are more than the parade of vain regrets.
Let Jacques stand Wert(h)ering by the wounded deer -
We shall make merry, honest friends of mine,
At this unruly time of year,
The Feast of Valentine.

I know how, day by weary day,
Hope fades, love fades, a thousand pleasures fade.
I have not trudged in vain that way
On which life's daylight dark...Read more of this...
by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...hout our knowledge, we became a pain or torment or despair one to the other;
If it should come about that weariness or hackneyed pleasure unbent in us the golden bow of lofty desire;
If the crystal of pure thought must fall in our hearts and break;
If, in spite of all, I should feel myself vanquished because I had not bowed my will sufficiently to the divine immensity of goodness;
Then, oh! then let us embrace like two sublime madmen who beneath the broken skies cling to ...Read more of this...
by Verhaeren, Emile
...He never missed a day’s work digging graves,

Boasting he could do a six-footer

Single-handed in two hours flat.

That hackneyed phrase

‘He drank all his wages’

Doesn’t convey his nightly rages

The flow of obscenities about menstruation

While the three younger ones were in bed

And you waited with your mother

To walk the streets of Seacroft.

“Your father murdered your mother”

As Auntie Margaret said,

Should a witness

Need indicting.



Your mother’s growing cancer w...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...ous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while th...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert



...was doing. Here he offered me a drink. 

I declined -- 'TWAS self-denial -- and I lectured him on booze, 
Using all the hackneyed arguments that preachers mostly use; 
Things I'd heard in temperance lectures (I was young and rather green), 
And I ended by referring to the man he might have been. 

Then a wise expression struggled with the bruises on his face, 
Though his argument had scarcely any bearing on the case: 
`What's the good o' keepin' sober? Fellers rise and feller...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Hackneyed poems.


Book: Reflection on the Important Things