Famous Manhattan Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Manhattan poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous manhattan poems. These examples illustrate what a famous manhattan poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...e swart-cheek’d two-sworded envoys,
Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive,
Ride to-day through Manhattan.
Libertad!
I do not know whether others behold what I behold,
In the procession, along with the nobles of Asia, the errand-bearers,
Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the ranks marching;
But I will sing you a song of what I behold, Libertad.
2
When million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to her pavements;
When the...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...intersecting all points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the north-east, north-west,
south-west,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the ruins of all the
rest;
On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours be the
stake—and
respite no more.
7
(Lo! high toward heaven, this day,
Libertad! from the conqueress’ field return’d,
I mark the n...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...Israel Cemetery
But l want a big funeral
St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in
Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother
96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-
in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters
their grandchildren,
companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan--
Next, teacher Trungpa Vajrac...Read more of this...
by
Cohen, Leonard
...years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I t...Read more of this...
by
Giovanni, Nikki
...o check the image noticed that the school yard was covered with asphalt no green – no trees grow in manhattan then, well, i thought the sky i'll do a big blue sky poem but all the clouds have winged low since no-Dick was elected so i thought again and it occurred to me maybe i shouldn't write at all but clean my gun and check my kerosene supply perhaps these are not poetic <...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...ame the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it's Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it's the U.S.A.
A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in the...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and
drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments—some, starting away, flush’d and
reckless;
Some, their time up, returning, with thinn’d ranks—young, yet very old, worn,
marching,
noticing nothing;)
—Give me the shores and the wharves heavy-fringed with the bla...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...edletopped, Empire State's
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan,
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees
surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor--
Geodesic science at the waters edge--Cars running up
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospi...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...sisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicid...Read more of this...
by
Lorde, Audre
...n Broadway.
Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?
When my mother's first-born cries for milk
in the brutal city winter
do the faces of your other daughters dim
like the image of the treeferned yard
where a dark girl first cooked for you
and her ash heap still smells of curry?
III.
Did the secret of my sisters steal your tongue
like I stole money f...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...1
MANHATTAN’S streets I saunter’d, pondering,
On time, space, reality—on such as these, and abreast with them, prudence.
2
After all, the last explanation remains to be made about prudence;
Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that suits immortality.
The Soul is of itself;
All verges to it—all has reference to what ensues; ...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...won my allegiance most,
though it was also
the hallmark of our ruin,
and quick as anything
seen in transit:
where Manhattan ends
in the narrowing
geographical equivalent
of a sigh (asphalt,
arc of trestle, dull-witted
industrial tanks
and scaffoldings, ancient now,
visited by no one)
on the concrete
embankment just
above the river,
a sudden density
and concentration
of trash, so much
I couldn't pick out
any one thing
from our rising track
as it arced on...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...WHY! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love—or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, ...Read more of this...
by
Clampitt, Amy
...ugh it were indigenous.
But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above—
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're
made of, is motion....Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...First, London, for its myriads; for its height,
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite;
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . .
Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays
Than, having beauty and your twenty years,
You have the means to conquer and the ways,
And coming where...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...the Lena;
Others the Niger or the Congo—others the Indus, the Burampooter and Cambodia;
Others wait at the wharves of Manhattan, steam’d up, ready to start;
Wait, swift and swarthy, in the ports of Australia;
Wait at Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, Marseilles, Lisbon, Naples, Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux,
the
Hague, Copenhagen;
Wait at Valparaiso, Rio Janeiro, Panama;
Wait at their moorings at Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans,
Galveston,
San
Francis...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...revolt, and stop with fugitives, and them that plot and
conspire.
24
Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding;
No sentimentalist—no stander above men and women, or apart from them;
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me;
And whatever is done or said returns at...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...s, and capitol of the nation of States,
Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans, or for the poor or sick,
Manhattan steamboats and clippers, taking the measure of all seas.
The shapes arise!
Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users, and all that neighbors them,
Cutters down of wood, and haulers of it to the Penobscot or Kennebec,
Dwellers in cabins among the California mountains, or by the little lakes, or on the
Columbia,
Dwellers south on th...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...-cylinder’d steam printing-press—See, the electric
telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;
See, through Atlantica’s depths, pulses American, Europe
reaching—pulses of Europe, duly return’d;
See, the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the
steam-whistle;
See, ploughmen, ploughing farms—See, miners, digging mines—See, the
numberless factories;
See, mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools—See from among ...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...f desire.
She visited in '68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt,
lipstick pale as apricot milk,
hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear,
I thought in my superiority of the moment,
whatever has happened to poor Cecile?
She was out of fashion, out of the game,
disqualified, disdained, dis-
membered from the club of desire.
Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th cent...Read more of this...
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