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Famous Isolated Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till...Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...A NOISELESS, patient spider, 
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; 
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, 
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; 
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand, 
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, 
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them; 
...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...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 poems for America? 
For our victorious armies, and the offspring following the armies?)

Piety and conformity to them that like! 
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like! 
I am he who taunti...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...e is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...s we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
...Read more of this...



by Larkin, Philip
...gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages....Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...t the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

 III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bo...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...er the Empire's ban 
 By the Diet of Frankfort; by the Council 
 Of Pisa banished from the Holy Church; 
 Reprobate, isolated, cursed—yet still 
 Unconquered 'mid his mountains and in will; 
 The bitter foe of the Count Palatine 
 And Treves' proud archbishop; who has spurned 
 For sixty years the ladder which the Empire 
 Upreared to scale his walls? Hast heard that he 
 Shelters the brave—the flaunting rich man strips— 
 Of master makes a slave? That here, above 
...Read more of this...

by Verhaeren, Emile
...he thick felt of the mist's white hood,
Death with his silence seals the sere
Old fishermen of madness here.


The isolated, they abide
Deep in the mist—still side by side.
But seeing one another never;
Weary are both their arms—and yet
Their work their ruin doth beget.


Each for himself works desperately,
He knows not why—no dreams has he;
Long have they worked, for long, long years,
While every instant brings its fears;
Nor have they ever
Quitted the borde...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...un
loaded with leaps but not fired while your neck
holds your head still listening: as when

while swimming in some isolated place
a girl hears leaves rustle and turns to look:
the forest pool reflected in her face....Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...as keen. 
 'Twas a poor statue underneath a mass 
 Of leafless branches, with a blackened back 
 And a green foot—an isolated Faun 
 In old deserted park, who, bending forward, 
 Half-merged himself in the entangled boughs, 
 Half in his marble settings. He was there, 
 Pensive, and bound to earth; and, as all things 
 Devoid of movement, he was there—forgotten. 
 
 Trees were around him, whipped by icy blasts— 
 Gigantic chestnuts, without leaf or bird, 
 And, li...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...ens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes;
There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow, 
Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice. 

There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches, 
Giving light enough to show them what was there upon the shelves— 
Where there was more for them to see than pleasure would remember
Of something that had been alive and once had been themselves. 
There were some who stirred the ruins with a...Read more of this...

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