Famous Libraries Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Libraries poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous libraries poems. These examples illustrate what a famous libraries poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ill you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be so...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...y 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 not say they are not gr...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...rs as we lose
sight of the single human through the cause.
So every spring these branches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—paper to snow—
but, at zero of suffering, one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.
As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
w...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...history of the past for myself, and for these
chants—and now I have found it;
It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither accept nor reject;)
It is no more in the legends than in all else;
It is in the present—it is this earth to-day;
It is in Democracy—(the purport and aim of all the past;)
It is the life of one man or one woman to-day—the average man of to-day;
It is in languages, social customs, literatures, arts;
It is in the broad show of ar...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...the first.
For I bless God in the honey of the sugar-cane and the milk of the cocoa.
For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.
For I bless God in the strength of my loins and for the voice which he hath made sonorous.
For tis no more a merit to provide for oneself, but to quit all for the sake of the Lord.
For there is no invention but the gift of God, and no grace like the grace of gratitude.
...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...ed
inexplicably from Castilian
to Catalan, a language I
couldn't follow. That dust,
fine and gray, peculiar
to libraries, slipped
between the glossy pages
and my sight, a slow darkness
calmed me, and I forgot
the agony of those men
I'd come to love, forgot
the battles lost and won,
forgot the final trek
over hopeless mountain roads,
defeat, surrender, the vows
to live on. I slept until
the lights came on and off.
A girl was prodding my arm,
for t...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture well.
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here unvalued underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground and never soars,
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars,
Tough and screaming as birch-bark,
Goes like bullet to its mark,
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the wa...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...SHUT not your doors to me, proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring;
Forth from the army, the war emerging—a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing—the drift of it everything;
A book separate, not link’d with the rest, nor felt by the intellect,
But you, ye untold latencies, will thrill to every page;
Through Space an...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...ot a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.
In a while I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch,
sending a cold shower down on us both.
But for now I...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...f the tallest and costliest buildings, or shops selling goods from the rest
of
the
earth,
Nor the place of the best libraries and schools—nor the place where money is plentiest,
Nor the place of the most numerous population.
Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards;
Where the city stands that is beloved by these, and loves them in return, and understands
them;
Where no monuments exist to heroes, but in the common words and deeds;
Where...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...ication
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. "But what about
So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one different s...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...nse.
There they were reciev'd by Men who occupied the sixth
chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in
libraries.
____________________________________________________
PLATE 16
The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence
and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth. the causes
of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are,
the cunning of weak and tame minds. which have power to resist
energy. according to...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...g for ever.
A house was there
Beside the river
And I, arrived,
An expected guest
About to explore
Old gardens and libraries -
But the car was waiting
To drive me away.
One last look
Into that bright stream -
Trout there were
And clear on the bottom
Monster form
Of the great crayfish
That crawls to the moon.
On its rocky bed
Living water
In whorls and ripples
Flowing unbended.
There was the car
To drive me away.
We crossed the river
Of living water -
I...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
Then toward that man or that woman, swiftly hasten all—None refuse, all attend;
Armies, ships, antiquities, the dead, libraries, paintings, machines, cities, hate,
despair,
amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in close ranks;
They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the mouth of that man, or that
woman.
.... O I see arise orators fit for inland America;
And I see it is as slow to become an orator as to become a man;
And ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...aceably on farms, laboring, reaping,
filling
barns,
Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories, libraries, shows, courts,
theatres, wonderful monuments.
Are those billions of men really gone?
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
Did they achieve nothing for good, for themselves?
I believe of all those billions of men and women that fill’d the unnamed lands, every
one
exis...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...for trial,
Or back of a rock, in the open air,
(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not—nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill—first watching lest any person, for miles
around,
approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea, or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss, or the new hu...Read more of this...
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