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Famous Nude Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Tebb, Barry
...terfall with Gudrun bathing, I showed

Them Gauguin and Fra Angelico in gold and a film

On painting from life, and the nude girls

Bothered no-one.



It was the Sixties -

Art was life and life was art and in the

Staff-room we talked of poetry and politics

And passionately I argued with John. a clinical

Psychologist, on Freud and Jung; Anne, at forty

One, wanted to be sterilised and amazingly asked

My advice but that was how it was then: Dianne

Went off to joi...Read more of this...



by Brodsky, Joseph
...t spare his kin:
what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen it climbs up his thigh: gangrene....Read more of this...

by Jong, Erica
...omen share
& yet agree to hide
as if
they might then
hide it from themselves.

I will not hide.

I write in the nude.
I name names.
I am I.
The doctor's name is Love....Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark——
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does th...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...his captain's bed."
"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"
"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my 
 stomach
shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "
"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth 
 & fingers along my waist"
"He gave great head"
So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commin-
 gling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997
...Read more of this...



by Plath, Sylvia
...surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.

For fiv...Read more of this...

by Corso, Gregory
...long the brink of Paradise
 O Bomb O final Pied Piper
 both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
 God abandoned mock-nude
 beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
 He cannot hear thy flute's
 happy-the-day profanations
 He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
 His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
 Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
 Sealed angels unsing Him
 A thunderless God A dead God
 O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
 That I lean forward on a desk of science
 an astrologe...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ed.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind....Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...

Anne: 
Fat Lazarus in his red suit. 

Forgive us, Father, for we know not. 

Ms. Dog prefers to sunbathe nude. 
Let the indifferent sky look on. 
So what! 
Let Mrs. Sewal pull the curtain back, 
from her second story. 
So what! 
Let United Parcel Service see my parcel. 
La de dah. 
Sun, you hammer of yellow, 
you hat on fire, 
you honeysuckle mama, 
pour your blonde on me! 
Let me laugh for an entire hour 
at your supreme being, your Cad...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...te

al nocchier de la livida palude,

che 'ntorno a li occhi avea di fiamme rote.

 Ma quell'anime, ch'eran lasse e nude,

cangiar colore e dibattero i denti,

ratto che 'nteser le parole crude.

 Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti,

l'umana spezie e 'l loco e 'l tempo e 'l seme

di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti.

 Poi si ritrasser tutte quante insieme,

forte piangendo, a la riva malvagia

ch'attende ciascun uom che Dio non teme.

 Caron dimonio, con occhi di ...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...n, pilot of the livid marsh, 
whose eyes were ringed about with wheels of flame. 


Ma quell'anime, ch'eran lasse e nude, 
cangiar colore e dibattero i denti, 
ratto che 'nteser le parole crude . 

But all those spirits, naked and exhausted, 
had lost their color, and they gnashed their teeth 
as soon as they heard Charon's cruel words; 


Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti, 
l'umana spezie e 'l loco e 'l tempo e 'l seme 
di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti . 

they e...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...s
To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve....Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...>

 Pard's girlfriend is a Jew. Twenty-four years old, getting

over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Pard about a nude pho-

tograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in Playboy

magazine.

 "There's nothing to worry about, " she says. "If they use

that photograph, it only means that 12, 000, 000 men will look

at my boobs. "

 This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money. As

she sits in the other room in the California bush, sh...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...victims' cry. 
 At both extremes, unflinching frost, the centre scorching hot; 
 Land storms that strip the orchards nude, leave beaten grain to rot; 
 Oceans that rise with sudden force to wash the bloody land, 
 Where War, amid sob-drowning cheers, claps weapons in each hand. 
 And this to those who, luckily, abide afar— 
 This is, ha! ha! a star! 


 




...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...n confidence; 
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

20
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; 
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? 

What is a man, anyhow? What am I? What are you? 

All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own; 
Else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, 
That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth; 
That life is a suck and a sell...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...e
is closed; the tub exists behind our back;
its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge
the fabrication of some cloth to cover
such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large:
each day demands we create our whole world over,
disguising the constant horror in a coat
of many-colored fictions; we mask our past
in the green of Eden, pretend future's shining fruit
can sprout from the navel of this present waste.
In this particu...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife,...Read more of this...

by Dove, Rita
...or to her cheeks."Why,
the aplomb with which we've managed
to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced

her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,
faintly futuristic landscapes strewn
with carwrecks and bodies being chewed

by rabid cocker spaniels."I'd like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish . . ."A delicate rebuff

before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now.Me, he drapes in blues and carmine--
a...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...ose by upon a beryl column, clad
In the fresh flower of adolescent grace,
They set the dear Bithynian shepherd lad,
The nude Antinous. That gentle face,
Forever beautiful, forever sad,
Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze,
Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile
At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile.

And there were shapes of Beauty myriads more,
Clustering their rosy bridal bed around,
Whose scented breadth a silken fabric wore
Broidered with p...Read more of this...

by Francis, Robert
...which the more foreign.
At home he was called touchy; here he knew he was.

Impossible to say. The dazzling nude with sex
lovingly displayed like carven fruit, the black
robe sweeping a holy and unholy dust.

Always the flesh whether to lacerate of kiss-
Conspiracy of fauns and clerics smiling back
and forth at each other acquiescently through leaves.

Caught between wan monastic mountains wearing the tonsure
and the all-siren, ever-dimpling sea, he saw
(h...Read more of this...

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