Famous New World Poems by Famous Poets

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

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An Ode in Time of Hesitation

by William Vaughn Moody
 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted ***** regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.


I 

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made 
To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe, 
And set here in the city's talk and trade 
To the good memory of...Read more of this...

A Song of Brave Men

by Henry Lawson
 Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave? – 
This is the song of brave men who never know they are brave: 
Ceaselessly watching to save you, stranger from foreign lands, 
Soundly asleep in your state room, full sail for the Goodwin Sands! 
Life is a dream, they tell us, but life seems very real,...Read more of this...

Cairo Jag

by Keith Douglas
 Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,
a pasty Syrian with a few words of English
or the Turk who says she is a princess--she dances
apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne
always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:
she has all the photographs and his letters
tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.
All this takes place in...Read more of this...

The Voice of Toil

by William Morris
 I heard men saying, Leave hope and praying,
All days shall be as all have been;
To-day and to-morrow bring fear and sorrow,
The never-ending toil between.

When Earth was younger mid toil and hunger,
In hope we strove, and our hands were strong;
Then great men led us, with words they fed us,
And bade us right the earthly wrong.

Go read in story their deeds...Read more of this...

The Quality Of Sprawl

by Les Murray
 Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image. 

Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still...Read more of this...

The Pro-Consuls

by Rudyard Kipling
 The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart's desire at price of his heart's blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good.
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations,
At the day's need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against...Read more of this...

The Quest

by Aleister Crowley
 A part, immutable, unseen,
Being, before itself had been,
Became. Like dew a triple queen
Shone as the void uncovered:
The silence of deep height was drawn
A veil across the silver dawn
On holy wings that hovered. 

The music of three thoughts became 
The beauty, that is one white flame,
The justice that surpasses shame,
The victory, the splendour,
The sacred fountain that is whirled
From depths beyond...Read more of this...

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

by Rudyard Kipling
 1919

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
'eering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

Ne were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us,...Read more of this...

To Foreign Lands

by Walt Whitman
 I HEARD that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle, the New World, 
And to define America, her athletic Democracy; 
Therefore I send you my poems, that you behold in them what you wanted....Read more of this...

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport

by Emma Lazarus
 Here, where the noises of the busy town, 
The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.

What prayers were in this...Read more of this...

The Age

by Osip Mandelstam
 My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries' worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they've brought the peak of...Read more of this...

A New World

by George William Russell
 I WHO had sought afar from earth
 The faery land to meet,
Now find content within its girth
 And wonder nigh my feet.


To-day a nearer love I choose
 And seek no distant sphere;
For aureoled by faery dews
 The dear brown breasts appear.


With rainbow radiance come and go
 The airy breaths of day;
And eve is all a pearly glow
 With moonlit...Read more of this...

The Sea Took Pity

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 The sea took pity: it interposed with doom: 
‘I have tall daughters dear that heed my hand: 
Let Winter wed one, sow them in her womb, 
And she shall child them on the New-world strand.’
. . . . . . . ....Read more of this...

Honors - Part I

by Jean Ingelow
A Scholar is musing on his want of success.)

To strive—and fail. Yes, I did strive and fail;
  I set mine eyes upon a certain night
To find a certain star—and could not hail
      With them its deep-set light.
Fool that I was! I will rehearse my fault:
  I, wingless, thought myself on high to lift
Among...Read more of this...

Proclamation Without Pretension

by Tristan Tzara
 Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief

The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances

Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance...Read more of this...

Exhortation: Summer 1919

by Claude McKay
 Through the pregnant universe rumbles life's terrific thunder, 
And Earth's bowels quake with terror; strange and terrible storms break, 
Lightning-torches flame the heavens, kindling souls of men, thereunder: 
Africa! long ages sleeping, O my motherland, awake! 

In the East the clouds glow crimson with the new dawn that is breaking, 
And its golden glory fills the western skies. 
O...Read more of this...

Dream Song 130: When I saw my friend covered with blood I thought

by John Berryman
 When I saw my friend covered with blood, I thought
This is the end of the dream, now I'll wake up.
That was more years ago
than I care to reckon, and my friend is not 
dying but adhering to an élite group
in California O.

Why did I never wake, when covered with blood
I saw my fearful friend, his nerves are bad
with the...Read more of this...

Modern Love XXVII: Distraction is the Panacea

by George Meredith
 Distraction is the panacea, Sir! 
I hear my oracle of Medicine say. 
Doctor! that same specific yesterday 
I tried, and the result will not deter 
A second trial. Is the devil's line 
Of golden hair, or raven black, composed? 
And does a cheek, like any sea-shell rosed, 
Or clear as widowed sky, seem most divine? 
No matter, so I...Read more of this...

Brave New World

by Robert William Service
 One spoke: "Come, let us gaily go
With laughter, love and lust,
Since in a century or so
We'll all be boneyard dust.
When unborn shadows hold the screen,
(Our betters, I'll allow)
'Twill be as if we'd never been,
A hundred years from now. 

When we have played life's lively game
Right royally we'll rot,
And not a soul will care a damn
The why or how we...Read more of this...

Middle Passage

by Robert Hayden
 I 

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: 

Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, 
sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; 
horror the corposant and compass rose. 

Middle Passage: 
voyage through death 
to life upon these shores. 

"10 April 1800-- 
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says 
their moaning is a prayer for death, 
our and their own. Some...Read more of this...

Progress

by Matthew Arnold
 The Master stood upon the mount, and taught. 
He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes; 
‘The old law’, they said, ‘is wholly come to naught! 
Behold the new world rise!’ 

‘Was it’, the Lord then said, ‘with scorn ye saw 
The old law observed by Scribes and Pharisees? 
I say unto you, see ye keep that law 
More...Read more of this...

Spring And All

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed...Read more of this...

Song VI: Cherish Life that Abideth

by William Morris
 Love is enough: cherish life that abideth,
Lest ye die ere ye know him, and curse and misname him;
For who knows in what ruin of all hope he hideth,
On what wings of the terror of darkness he rideth?
And what is the joy of man's life that ye blame him
For his bliss grown a sword, and his rest grown a fire?...Read more of this...

Thoughts

by Walt Whitman
 OF Public Opinion; 
Of a calm and cool fiat, sooner or later, (How impassive! How certain and final!) 
Of the President with pale face, asking secretly to himself, What will the people say
 at
 last? 
Of the frivolous Judge—Of the corrupt Congressman, Governor, Mayor—Of such as
 these,
 standing helpless and exposed; 
Of the mumbling and screaming priest—(soon, soon deserted;)
Of...Read more of this...

The New World

by Philip Levine
 A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."

My grandfather in his prime could outshout
the Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles
along the river. Hamtramck hungered

for yellow freestone peaches, downriver
wakened from a dream of work, Zug Island danced
into the bright day glad to be alive.

Full-figured women in their negligees
streamed into the...Read more of this...

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