Famous Infamous Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Cloris Charmes Dissolved by EUDORA

by Anne Killigrew
 NOt that thy Fair Hand 
Should lead me from my deep Dispaire, 
Or thy Love, Cloris, End my Care, 
 And back my Steps command: 
But if hereafter thou Retire, 
To quench with Tears, thy Wandring Fire, 
 This Clue I'll leave behinde, 
 By which thou maist untwine
 The Saddest Way, 
 To shun the Day,
 That ever...Read more of this...

To The Memory Of My Beloved The Author Mr William Shakespeare And What He Hath Left Us

by Ben Jonson
 To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For silliest ignorance on these may light,
Which when it sounds at best but...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Brand

by Robert William Service
 'Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,
Tellus, the smith, had taken to wife a maiden amazingly fair;
Tellus, the brawny worker in iron, hairy and heavy of hand,
Saw her and loved her and bore her away from the tribe of a Southern land;
Deeming her worthy to queen his home and mother him...Read more of this...

Genius

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 Genius, like gold and precious stones, 
is chiefly prized because of its rarity. 

Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild, 
incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, 
and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter. 

Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres 
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul 
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid...Read more of this...

Infamous Poet

by Barry Tebb
 I never did fit in – at six or sixty one –

I stand out in a crowd, too young or old

And gather pity like a shroud. "Is that real silk?"

A teenager inquired. "As real as Oxfam ever is

For one pound fifty." The vast ballroom was growing misty

And blurred with alcohol I’ve never had the taste for.

"**** off" a forty-plus...Read more of this...

The Faerie Queene Book III Canto VI

by Edmund Spenser
The birth of faire Belphoebe and
Of Amoret is told.
The Gardins of Adonis fraught
With pleasures manifold.
 
And gentle sprite deforme with rude rusticity.
 But to this faire Belphoebe in her berth
The heauens so fauourable were and free,
Looking with myld aspect vpon the earth,
In th'Horoscope of her natiuitee,
That all the gifts of grace and chastitee
On her they poured forth of plenteous horne;
Ioue...Read more of this...

My heart the chamber of His musing is

by Hafez
My heart the chamber of His musing is,
Mine eye the mirror of His beauty’s face,
My hand the servant of His purposes.

I, who to neither wealth nor worldly place
Incline, nor to religion’s promised ease,
Bend low beneath the burden of His grace.

Since all I have is of His bounty given,
So is my poor pride but in His proud name,
His humble service is...Read more of this...

The Dead

by Philip Levine
 Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,
Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
Dead men render love and war no heed,
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
And when at last they blunder into bed
World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
These...Read more of this...

Shirt

by Robert Pinsky
 The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The...Read more of this...

On The Death Of A Fair Infant Dying Of A Cough

by John Milton
 I

O fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken Primrose fading timelesslie,
Summers chief honour if thou hadst outlasted
Bleak winters force that made thy blossome drie;
For he being amorous on that lovely die
That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss
But kill'd alas, and then bewayl'd his fatal bliss.

II

For since grim Aquilo his charioter
By boistrous rape th' Athenian damsel got,
He thought...Read more of this...

Voltaire at Ferney

by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast,
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.

Far off in Paris where his enemies
Whsipered that he...Read more of this...

Electra On Azalea Path

by Sylvia Plath
 The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering --
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had...Read more of this...

Dream Song 71: Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four

by John Berryman
 Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four
hearers in the racket of the market
with ancient signs, infamous characters,
new rythms. On the steps he was beloved,
hours a day, by all his four, or more,
depending. And they paid him.

It was not, so, like no one listening
but critics famed & Henry's pals or other
tellers at all
chiefly in another country. No.
He by the heart...Read more of this...

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