Famous Individual Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Letter From Li Po

...ime, each time.

Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies
rattle, detach, and fall, each to his own
perplexed and individual death, Lady Yang
gone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk,
the peony face behind a fan of frost,
the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,
beyond recall by any alchemist
or incantation from the Book of Change:
unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,
the fir cone of a thousand years ago:
still, in the loving, and the saying so,
as when we name the hi...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad


A Message to America

...
Who are willing to give -- what you've no mind to -- 
And understand -- what you are blind to -- 
The things that the individual 
Must sacrifice for the good of all. 


You have a leader who knows -- the man 
Most fit to be called American, 
A prophet that once in generations 
Is given to point to erring nations 
Brighter ideals toward which to press 
And lead them out of the wilderness. 
Will you turn your back on him once again? 
Will you give the tiller once more to men ...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

America

...lic. 
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly 
 mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as 
 individual as his automobiles more so they're 
 all different sexes. 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 
 down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
 munist Cell meetings they so...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shores

...more than
 one
 eyesight countervails another, or one life countervails another. 

All is eligible to all, 
All is for individuals—All is for you, 
No condition is prohibited—not God’s, or any. 

All comes by the body—only health puts you rapport with the universe.

Produce great persons, the rest follows. 

4
America isolated I sing; 
I say that works made here in the spirit of other lands, are so much poison in The States.


(How dare such insects as we see assume to write...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Days of Pie and Coffee

...a voting man I'd vote for you, I said.
"A bedoozling day to be lost in the country, I say.
Leastways, I am a misplaced individual."
We introduced ourselves
and swapped a few stories.
He was a veteran and a salesmen
who didn't believe in his product--
I've forgotten what it was--hair restorer,
parrot feed--and he enjoyed nothing more
then a a day spent meandering the back roads 
in his jalopy. I gave him directions 
to the Denton farm, but I doubt 
that he followed them, he d...Read more of this...
by Tate, James


Essay on Man

...hatever IS, is RIGHT."

Argument of the Second Epistle:

Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Himself, as an Individual. The business of Man not to pry into God, but
to study himself.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; 
The proper study of Mankind is Man. 
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,(28) 
A being darkly wise, and rudely great: 
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, 
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, 
He hangs between; in ...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander

Identity

...1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:

an order of instinct prevails
 through all accidents of circumstance,
  though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
   webs:
   you can go all
  around the fringing attachments

  and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
 numerous occasions of accident:

2) the possible settings
...Read more of this...
by Ammons, A R

Locksley Hall

...eart of existence beat for ever like a boy's? 

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. 

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. 

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn: 

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a m...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Paradise Lost: Book 04

...ee being I lent 
'Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart, 
'Substantial life, to have thee by my side 
'Henceforth an individual solace dear; 
'Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim 
'My other half:' With that thy gentle hand 
Seised mine: I yielded;and from that time see 
How beauty is excelled by manly grace, 
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair. 
So spake our general mother, and with eyes 
Of conjugal attraction unreproved, 
And meek surrender, half-embracing lea...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 05

...im shall bow 
All knees in Heaven, and shall confess him Lord: 
Under his great vice-gerent reign abide 
United, as one individual soul, 
For ever happy: Him who disobeys, 
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day, 
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls 
Into utter darkness, deep ingulfed, his place 
Ordained without redemption, without end. 
So spake the Omnipotent, and with his words 
All seemed well pleased; all seemed, but were not all. 
That day, as other solemn day...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Renascence

...ous thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the h...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...game,
Which doesn't exist until they are out of it.
It seems like a very hostile universe
But as the principle of each individual thing is
Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others
As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This alway...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

So Long

...riend you were looking for.

I announce a man or woman coming—perhaps you are the one, (So long!) 
I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate,
 fully
 armed. 

I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold; 
I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation; 
I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded;
I announce a race of splendid and savage old men. 

3
O thicker and f...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Thanatopsis

...rished thee shall claim 
Thy growth to be resolved to earth again  
And lost each human trace surrendering up 
Thine individual being shalt thou go 25 
To mix forever with the elements; 
To be a brother to the insensible rock  
And to the sluggish clod which the rude swain 
Turns with his share and treads upon. The oak 
Shall send his roots abroad and pierce thy mould. 30 
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place 
Shalt thou retire alone nor couldst thou wish 
Couch ...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen

The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar

...r! The child must carry
His fathers on his back.

But seeing that so much is past
And that history has no ruth

For the individual,
Who drinks tea, who catches cold,

Let anger be general:
I hate an abstract thing.

 4

Brother and sister bounced
The bounding, unbroken ball,

The shattering sun fell down
Like swords upon their play,

Moving eastward among the stars
Toward February and October.

But the Maywind brushed their cheeks
Like a mother watching sleep,

And if for a m...Read more of this...
by Schwartz, Delmore

The End Of March

...els of sand, 
the drab, damp, scattered stones 
were multi-colored, 
and all those high enough threw out long shadows, 
individual shadows, then pulled them in again. 
They could have been teasing the lion sun, 
except that now he was behind them 
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide, 
making those big, majestic paw-prints, 
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with....Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Transparent Man

...ve, like Belgian lace, throughout the head.
But this last week it seems I have found myself
Looking beyond, or through, individual trees
At the dense, clustered woodland just behind them,
Where those great, nameless crowds patiently stand.
It's become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle
And keeps me fascinated. My eyes are twenty-twenty,
Or used to be, but of course I can't unravel
The tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,
That mackled, cinder grayness. It's a riddle
Beyond the...Read more of this...
by Hecht, Anthony

The Vision of Judgment

...medly.' 

I think I know enough of most of the writers to whom he is supposed to allude, to assert, that they, in their individual capacities, have done more good, in the charities of life, to their fellow-creatures, in any one year, than Mr. Southey has done harm to himself by his absurdities in his whole life; and this is saying a great deal. But I have a few questions to ask. 

1stly, Is Mr. Southey the author of 'Wat Tyler'? 

2ndly, Was he not refused a remedy at law by ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

Tortoise Shell

...late
Of the baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within,
The complex, manifold involvednes,s of an individual creature
Plotted out
On this small bird, this rudiment,
This little dome, this pediment
Of all creation,
This slow one....Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift

...rve it,
Because no age could more deserve it.
Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice, but spared the name;
No individual could resent
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct;
For he abhorred that senseless tribe
Who call it humour when they gibe.
He spared a hump, or crooked nose,
Whose owners set not up for beaux.
True genuine dulness moved his pity,
Unless it offered to be witty.
Those who their ignornace...Read more of this...
by Swift, Jonathan

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