Famous Imitation Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Imitation poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous imitation poems. These examples illustrate what a famous imitation poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Edgar Allan Poe
A dark unfathomed tide
Of interminable pride -
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem;
I say that dream was fraught
With a wild and waking thought
Of beings that have been,
Which my spirit hath not seen,
Had I let them pass me by,
With a dreaming eye!
Let none of earth inherit
That vision...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates
Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy.
The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps
Is heard no more, nor the neighs of restless mares between the shafts.
The shining brass of harness hangs in bar-rooms or droops
From imitation beams.
Gelded stallions no longer chomp and champ
In stalls beneath...Read more of this...
by
Charles Webb
Its silver clasp looks like a man grasping
his hands above his head in victory;
the latches, like twin hatchbacks headed away.
There are no wheels, just four steel nipples for sliding.
A hexagonal seal announces the defunct
"U.S. Trunk Company." The frame is wood—
big, heavy, cheap—covered with imitation leather,
its blue just slightly darker than Mom's eyes.
"It's beautiful. Much too expensive," she told Dad,
and...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
The women are all wearing imitation silk scarves,
Blackpool or Biarritz, sipping Woman, masticating
The morning’s post, new babies and bathrooms, going
To file, snip, fiddle and smile through fish-eyes,
Crinkly green gloss, store it in stocking-tops
For next year abroad, that Pill, so perfect!
Flashing smiles from shiny domes and polished eye-lenses,
The men are glossy all over, snapping mortgages and scores
They slap fellow-souls at...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was full of holes
Where each leak in rainy weather made a pool;
And the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico and sacks –
There was little need for windows in the school.
Then we rode to school and back by the rugged gully-track,
On the old grey...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[This curious imitation of the ternary metre
of Dante was written at the age of 77.]
WITHIN a gloomy charnel-house one day
I view'd the countless skulls, so strangely mated,
And of old times I thought, that now were grey.
Close pack'd they stand, that once so fiercely hated,
And hardy bones, that to the death contended,
Are lying cross'd,--to lie for ever, fated.
What held...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Carew
Can we not force from widow'd poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust,
Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay
Upon thy ashes,...Read more of this...
by
Alexander Pushkin
I saw the Death, and she was seating
By quiet entrance at my own home,
I saw the doors were opened in my tomb,
And there, and there my hope was a-flitting
I'll die, and traces of my past
In days of future will be never sighted,
Look of my eyes will never be delighted
By dear look, in my existence last.
Farewell the somber world, where,...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
MY faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love.
Thy barb, whose hoofs outspeed the tempest's flight,
Bore thee far from me;
My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,
Did companion thee.
Ah!...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
MY faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks my love.
Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest's flight 5
Bore thee far from me;
My heart for my weak feet were weary soon
Did companion thee.
Ah! fleeter far than fleetest storm...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Come, let us rejoice in James Joyce, in the greatness of this poet,
king, and king of poets
For he is our poor dead king, he is the monarch and Caesar of English,
he is the veritable King of the King's English
The English of the life of the city,
and the English of music;
Let them rejoice because he rejoiced...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 145] SONNET CXVI. Non Tesin, Po, Varo, Arno, Adige e Tebro. HE EXTOLS THE LAUREL AND ITS FAVOURITE STREAM. Not all the streams that water the bright earth,Not all the trees to which its breast gives birth,Can cooling drop or healing balm impartTo slack the fire which scorches...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
Ithaca, October 1993: Jorie went on a lingerie
tear, wanting to look like a moll
in a Chandler novel. Dinner, consisting of three parts gin
and one part lime juice cordial, was a prelude to her hair.
There are, she said, poems that can be written
only when the poet is clad in black underwear.
But that's Jorie for you. Always cracking...Read more of this...
by
William Blake
Thou fair hair'd angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains light,
Thy bright torch of love; Thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and when thou drawest the
Blue curtains, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake;...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
YOU come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he...Read more of this...
by
John Wilmot
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Hic. On the grey sand beside the shallow stream
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on beside the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,
And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,
Magical shapes.
Ille. By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I...Read more of this...
by
Russell Edson
A man had a son who was an anvil. And then sometimes
he was an automobile tire.
I do wish you would sit still, said the father.
Sometimes his son was a rock.
I realize that you have quite lost boundary, where no
excess seems excessive, nor to where poverty roots hunger to
need. But should you allow time...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
They run to drabs and grays—and some of them sing they shall be washed whiter than snow—and some: We should worry.
Yes, Kalamazoo is a spot on the map
And...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Imitation poems.