Famous Misread Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Misread poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous misread poems. These examples illustrate what a famous misread poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Berry, Wendell
...you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel an...Read more of this...
by
Berryman, John
...any strategy,
wanting the ball bulled thro' all parts of the line
at once—proving, by his refusal to take Berlin,
he misread even Clauswitz—wide empty grin
that never lost a vote (O Adlai mine)....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...and cross-roads where faith meets fate
And neither will succumb.
I sat in a packed lecture hall while a Lacanian
Misread early Freud through a crooked lens
And for a year turned every seminar to war
To make him see his vision’s fatal flaw.
I poured over cabinets of case histories,
Tried living here and there and met an amah,
Teaching her Auden and Empson. Her tears mingled
With my own at our last hurried meeting
In a crowded tea room, teaching her Klein....Read more of this...
by
Matthews, William
...So here the great man stood,
fermenting malice and poems
we have to be nearly as fierce
against ourselves as he
not to misread by their disguises.
Blue in dawn haze, the tamarack
across the road is new since Frost
and thirty feet tall already.
No doubt he liked to scorch off
morning fog by simply staring through it
long enough so that what he saw
grew visible. "Watching the dragon
come out of the Notch," his children
used to call it. And no wonder
he chose a ...Read more of this...
by
Abercrombie, Lascelles
...reat purpose,
To strike His message through those dark vast tribes.
But one man! -- O surely it is folly,
And we misread the lot! One man, to thrust,
Even though in his soul the lamp was kindled
At God's own hands, one man's lit soul to thrust
The immense Indian darkness out of the world!
For human flesh there breeds as furiously
As the green things and the cattle; and it is all,
All this enormity of measureless folk,
Penn'd in a land so close to the devil's rei...Read more of this...
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