Famous Institutions Poems by Famous Poets

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

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America

...llions of genitals an unpublishable 
 private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour 
 and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of 
 underprivileged who live in my flowerpots 
 under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers 
 is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that 
 I'm a Catholic. 
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly 
 mood? 
I...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen


American Feuillage

...urprise and slaughter of enemies; 
—All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of These States—reminiscences,
 all
 institutions, 
All These States, compact—Every square mile of These States, without excepting a
 particle—you also—me also, 
Me pleas’d, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok’s fields,
Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies, shuffling between each
 other,
 ascending high in the air; 
The darting swallow, the destroyer of in...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Carol of Occupations

...tellations and named fancy names? 
Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or agriculture itself? 

Old institutions—these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and the practice handed
 along in
 manufactures—will we rate them so high? 
Will we rate our cash and business high?—I have no objection;
I rate them as high as the highest—then a child born of a woman and man I rate beyond
 all
 rate.


We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand; 
I do no...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Dolor

...tual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces....Read more of this...
by Roethke, Theodore

Homes Kid (For Glenn)

...ther children refused him.
  Acceptance he couldn't recognise
  even when it came, like waves
  gentling in his life.
  Institutions, foster homes,
  he knew them all.
  Fourteen going on ninety.
  Knowledge gleamed in his eyes.
  Though he has since been
  swept out of reach,
  particles of sand cling and
  memories are water-cold companions.



*first published Westerly Autumn 1995...Read more of this...
by Harcombe, Dale


I hear it was Charged against Me

...I HEAR it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions; 
But really I am neither for nor against institutions; 
(What indeed have I in common with them?—Or what with the destruction of them?) 
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of These States, inland and
 seaboard, 
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large, that dents the water,
Without edifices, or...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Motel Seedy

...a tongue. To put this color
green--exhausted grave grass--to cinder blocks
takes an understanding of loneliness
and/or institutions that terrifies.
It would seem not smart to create
a color scheme in a motel room
that's likely to cause impotence in men
and open sores in women,
but that's what this puce bedspread
with its warty, ratty tufts could do. It complements
the towels, torn and holding awful secrets
like the sail on a life raft
loaded with blackened, half-eaten corpse...Read more of this...
by Lux, Thomas

North Country

...f blowing air 

But this gaunt country, filled with mills and saws, 
With butter-works and railway-stations 
And public institutions, 
And scornful rumps of cows, 

North Country, filled with gesturing wood– 
Timber's the end it gives to branches, 
Cut off in cubic inches, 
Dripping red with blood....Read more of this...
by Slessor, Kenneth

Starting from Paumanok

...y change, they swiftly fill; 
Countless masses debouch upon them; 
They are now cover’d with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known. 

See, projected, through time, 
For me, an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop, 
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions; 
One generation playing its part, and passing on; 
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn, 
With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

There Are Not Many Kingdoms Left

...om this last undefiled
place, I would keep our governments, our civilization, and
all other spirit-forsaken and corrupt institutions.

O cold beautiful blossoms of the moon moving upon
her shoulders . . . the lips of the moon moving there . . .
where the touch of any other lips would be a profanation....Read more of this...
by Patchen, Kenneth

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