Famous Mediocre Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Mediocre Man

by Robert William Service
 I'm just a mediocre man
 Of no high-brow pretence;
A comfortable life I plan
 With care and commonsense.
I do the things most people do,
 I echo what they say;
And through my morning paper view
 The problems of the day.

No doubt you think I'm colourless,
 Profoundly commonplace;
And yet I fancy, more or less,
 I represent the race.
My name may stand for...Read more of this...

the ordinary again

by Rg Gregory
 (1) the ordinary

you are not interested in me
a receiver of food and a giver of ****
my brain knuckled under

i have rendered the skills of my 
limbs to generations of caesars
and caesar's gods have siphoned off my spirit
by day i have been trained to dismember my own brothers
my own pieces travel through the night yearning for union

in every land i...Read more of this...

With Tenure

by David Lehman
 If Ezra Pound were alive today
 (and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are...Read more of this...

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