Famous Impact Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Impact poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous impact poems. These examples illustrate what a famous impact poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Thomas Edward Brown
The Man that hath great griefs I pity not;
’Tis something to be great
In any wise, and hint the larger state,
Though but in shadow of a shade, God wot!
Moreover, while we wait the possible,
This man has touched the fact,
And probed till he has felt the core, where, packed
In pulpy folds, resides the ironic...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Crane
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Study in Whites
Wax-white --
Floor, ceiling, walls.
Ivory shadows
Over the pavement
Polished to cream surfaces
By constant sweeping.
The big room is coloured like the petals
Of a great magnolia,
And has a patina
Of flower bloom
Which makes it shine dimly
Under the electric lamps.
Chairs are ranged in rows
Like sepia seeds
Waiting fulfilment.
The chalk-white spot of a cook's cap
Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall --
Dull chalk-white striking the...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
Is it sounds
converging,
Sounds
nearing,
Infringement,
impingement,
Impact,
contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
skeletal,
strange?
Is it winds
curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
erecting the architecture of a world?
Is it
orchestration of the finger-tips,
graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
colour itself being god?...Read more of this...
by
Roger McGough
I explain quietly. You
hear me shouting. You
try a new tack. I
feel old wounds reopen.
You see both sides. I
see your blinkers. I
am placatory. You
sense a new selfishness.
I am a dove. You
recognize the hawk. You
offer an olive branch. I
feel the thorns.
You bleed. I
see crocodile tears. I
withdraw. You
reel from the impact....Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Until tonight they were separate specialties,
different stories, the best of their own worst.
Riding my warm cabin home, I remember Betsy's
laughter; she laughed as you did, Rose, at the first
story. Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone
going somewhere and we plotted it in the humdrum
school for proper girls. The next April the plane
bucked...Read more of this...
by
G K Chesterton
O learned man who never learned to learn,
Save to deduce, by timid steps and small,
From towering smoke that fire can never burn
And from tall tales that men were never tall.
Say, have you thought what manner of man it is
Of who men say "He could strike giants down" ?
Or what strong memories over time's...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(He speaks, but to himself, being aware how it is with her)
Think not I have not heard.
Well-fanged the double word
And well-directed flew.
I felt it. Down my side
Innocent as oil I see the ugly venom slide:
Poison enough to stiffen us both, and all our friends;
But I am not pierced, so there the mischief ends.
There is more to be said: I...Read more of this...
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