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Famous Magazine Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Bradstreet, Anne
...Absent upon Public Employment 

My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,
My joy, my magazine, of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
So many steps, head from the heart to sever,
If but a neck, soon should we be together.
I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black,
My Sun is gone so far in's zodiac,
Whom whilst I 'joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt,
His warmth such frid...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by 
 Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner 
 candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
 men are serious. Movie producers are serious. 
 Everybody's serious but me.Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...e Giant Mount, tow'ring all objects o'er, 
 And black'ning with its breath th' horizon evermore! 
 
 Fraser's Magazine 


 




...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...
But you,--you're just as little those as I-- 
You, Gigadibs, who, thirty years of age, 
Write statedly for Blackwood's Magazine, 
Believe you see two points in Hamlet's soul 
Unseized by the Germans yet--which view you'll print-- 
Meantime the best you have to show being still 
That lively lightsome article we took 
Almost for the true Dickens,--what's its name? 
"The Slum and Cellar, or Whitechapel life 
"Limned after dark!" it made me laugh, I know, 
And pleased a month, a...Read more of this...

by Zaran, Lisa
...
always runs ahead. The one 
that always tries to crush me with 
its future. 

Originally published in Literati Magazine, Winter 2005.
Copyright © Lisa Zaran 2005...Read more of this...



by Zaran, Lisa
...tragic, midnight melodies. 

My heart never tried 
to commit suicide before. 

Originally published in Literati Magazine, Winter 2005
Copyright © Lisa Zaran, 2005...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...nation's slumbers,
Ringing wrong but similar numbers.
Someone devised the silver screen
And the intimate Hollywood magazine,
And life is a Hades
Of clicking cameras,
And foreign ladies
Behaving amorous.
Gags have erased
Amusing dialog,
As gas has replaced
The crackling firelog.
All that glitters is sold as gold,
And our daily diet grows odder and odder,
And breakfast foods are dusty and cold -
It's a wise child
That knows its fodder.
Someone invented the auto...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...s;
Our General, as his actions show,
Gain'd like assistance from below,
By satan graced with full supplies
From all his magazine of lies.
Yet could his practice ne'er impart
The wit to tell a lie with art.
Those lies alone are formidable
Where artful truth is mix'd with fable.
But Gage has bungled oft so vilely,
No soul would credit lies so silly,
Outwent all faith, and stretch'd beyond
Credulity's extremest end:
Whence plain it seems, though satan once
O'erlook'd...Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...lular flesh of a stone.
Gas. Gossamer. My poker friends
Question your presence
In a poem by me, passing the magazine
One to another.

Not the stone and not the words, you
Like a veil over Arthur's headstone,
The passage from Proverbs he chose
While he was too ill to teach
And still well enough to read, I was
Beside the master craftsman
Delighting him day after day, ever
At play in his presence--you

A soothing veil of distraction playing over
Dying Arthur play...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...e starts 
Discovered and surprised. As when a spark 
Lights on a heap of nitrous powder, laid 
Fit for the tun some magazine to store 
Against a rumoured war, the smutty grain, 
With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the air; 
So started up in his own shape the Fiend. 
Back stept those two fair Angels, half amazed 
So sudden to behold the grisly king; 
Yet thus, unmoved with fear, accost him soon. 
Which of those rebel Spirits adjudged to Hell 
Comest thou, escaped ...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...idn't know about it until I got back to San Francisco

weeks after the thing had happened and picked up a copy of

Life magazine. There was a photograph of Hemingway on the

cover.

 "I wonder what Hemingway's up to, " I said to myself. I

looked inside the magazine and turned the pages to his death.

Trout Fishing in America forgot to tell me about it. I'm cer-

tain he knew. It must have slipped his mind.

 The woman who travels with me had menst...Read more of this...

by Hoagland, Tony
...
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ng the prisoners confined in the afterhold, to give them
 a chance for themselves. 

The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, 
They see so many strange faces, they do not know whom to trust.

Our frigate takes fire; 
The other asks if we demand quarter? 
If our colors are struck, and the fighting is done? 

Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, 
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun ...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...art, 
 The poet's blessing take, 
 Ere bleeds that aged heart, 
 Or child the woman make. 
 
 Dublin University Magazine. 


 




...Read more of this...

by Joyce, James
...eard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall,
 (Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall,
 Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he's kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he'll be sent by order of His Worship
To the penal jail of Mountjoy
 (Chorus) To the jail of Mountjoy!
 Jail him and joy.

He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother u...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...a husky guy, whose god was Nicotine,
With a "coffin-nail" a fixture in my mug;
I rolled them in the pages of a pulpwood magazine,
And hacked them with my jack-knife from the plug.
For, Oh to know the bliss and glow that good tobacco means,
Just live among the everlasting ice . . .
So judge my horror when I found my stock of magazines
Was chewed into a chowder by the mice.

A woeful week went by and not a single pill I had,
Me that would smoke my forty in a...Read more of this...

by Kay, Jackie
...ls over me
Leaves a gap
When she's gone
I think of her mother. She remembers how I read her
All those newspaper and magazine
Cuttings about adoption
She says her head's an encyclopedia
Of sob stories: the ones that were never
Told and committed suicide on their wedding nights

I always believed in the telling anyhow
You can't keep something like that secret
I wanted her to think of her other mother
Out there thinking that child I had will be
Eight today nine today all the...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...against so mighty a force, thought it fit to beat a parley; but while they were treating about the articles, one of the magazines in the Turkish army, wherein they had six hundred barrels of powder, blew up by accident, whereby six or seven hundred men were killed; which so enraged the infidels, that they would not grant any capitulation, but stormed the place with so much fury, that they took it, and put most of the garrison, with Signior Minotti, the governor, to the sword....Read more of this...

by Hikmet, Nazim
...velvet
 or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't 
 be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract 
 well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to 
 say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them 
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad 
I never knew I...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...t the back of Leeds Market

Where I wander in search of oil pastels

Irish folk and cheap socks.

The TLS mocks our magazine

With its sixties Cadillac pink

Psychedelic cover and every page crimson

Orange or mauve, revolutionary sonnets 

By Brenda Williams from her epic ‘Pain Clinic’

And my lacerating attacks on boring Bloodaxe

Neil Ghastly and Anvil’s preciosity and all the

Stuck-up ****-holes in their cubby-holes sending out

Rejection slip by rote – LPW...Read more of this...

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