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Famous Poems Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Aiken, Conrad
...o sky,'
where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po
spun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk'
(he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,'
and, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'
Here is the divine loneliness in which
we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,
the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face
touched, and loved, but still unknown, and then
a body, still mysterious in embrace.
Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leave
dust on the doorsi...Read more of this...



by Pope, Alexander
...rey,
Nor Time nor Moths e'er spoil'd so much as they:
Some dryly plain, without Invention's Aid,
Write dull Receits how Poems may be made:
These leave the Sense, their Learning to display,
And theme explain the Meaning quite away

You then whose Judgment the right Course wou'd steer,
Know well each ANCIENT's proper Character,
His Fable, Subject, Scope in ev'ry Page,
Religion, Country, Genius of his Age:
Without all these at once before your Eyes,
Cavil you may, but never Crit...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...in the spirit of other lands, are so much poison in The States.


(How dare such insects as we see assume to write poems for America? 
For our victorious armies, and the offspring following the armies?)

Piety and conformity to them that like! 
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like! 
I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, 
Crying, Leap from your seats, and contend for your lives! 

I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning every ...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...14

One Sister have I in our house,
And one, a hedge away.
There's only one recorded,
But both belong to me.

One came the road that I came—
And wore my last year's gown—
The other, as a bird her nest,
Builded our hearts among.

She did not sing as we did—
It was a different tune—
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.
...Read more of this...

by Milligan, Spike
...try staying alive.'
'Very well, ' said the man who was drowning. 'I'll try and stay afloat.
By reciting the poems of Browning
And other things he wrote.'
'Help, help, ' said the man with the disease, 'I suddenly feel quite ill.'
'Keep calm.' said the man who was drowning, ' Breathe deeply and lie quite still.'
'Oh dear, ' said the man with the awful disease. 'I think I'm going to die.'
'Farewell, ' said the man who was drowning.
Said th...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...in the lake, 
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad 
 stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these 
 poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy 
 to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls 
 in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' 
 rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with 
 gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- 
 ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station 
 solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, 
who faded out in vast...Read more of this...

by Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad
...0pt;">     of dust into pure gold!   Look! This is Love – Poems of Rumi, Annemarie Schimmel ...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...uantity
Or quality to worry the producer
About disposing of it. Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

She's one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont's the other. And the two have been
Yokefellows in the sap yoke from of old
In many Marches. And they lie like wedges,
...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...from the Thames; 
I hear fierce French liberty songs; 
I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems;
I hear the Virginia plantation-chorus of *******, of a harvest night, in the glare of
 pine-knots; 
I hear the strong baritone of the ’long-shore-men of Mannahatta; 
I hear the stevedores unlading the cargoes, and singing; 
I hear the screams of the water-fowl of solitary north-west lakes; 
I hear the rustling pattering of locusts, as they strike the ...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...r>


TRAGEDY, as it was antiently compos'd, hath been ever held the
gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems:
therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear,
or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is
to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight,
stirr'd up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is
Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for
so in Phy...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...on’d the earth
 much? 
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? 
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns
 left;) 
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the
 eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books; 
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...castles strong and feudalistic, 
could none of them restrain her? 
Nor shades of Virgil and Dante—nor myriad memories, poems, old associations, magnetize and
 hold on to her? 
But that she ’s left them all—and here? 

Yes, if you will allow me to say so,
I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see Her, 
The same Undying Soul of Earth’s, activity’s, beauty’s, heroism’s Expression, 
Out from her evolutions hither come—submerged the strata of her former themes, 
Hidden and co...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...lf; 
You shall be more to me than my poem. 

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all great poems also; 
I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles; 
(My judgments, thoughts, I henceforth try by the open air, the road;)
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like
 me; 
I think whoever I see must be happy. 

5
From this hour, freedom! 
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imagin...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...obbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into me (the other,
both the Camp Director and the camper),
you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,
and calls and letters and once a luncheon,
and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't!

Yet this year,
y...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...d Mohammed. Zuleika is the Persian name of Potiphar's wife; and her amour with Joseph constitutes one of the finest poems in their language. It is, therefore, no violation of costume to put the names of Cain, or Noah, into the mouth of a Moslem. 

(31) Paswan Oglou, the rebel of Widdin; who, for the last years of his life, set the whole power of the Porte at defiance. 

(32) "Horse-tail," the standard of a Pacha. 

(33) Giaffir, Pacha of Argyro Castro, or ...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...ore reality. 
80 Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. 
81 The imagination, here, could not evade, 
82 In poems of plums, the strict austerity 
83 Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. 
84 The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. 
85 What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? 
86 Out of what swift destruction did it spring? 
87 It was caparison of mind and cloud 
88 And something given to make whole among 
89 The ruses that were shattered by the l...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...attended. [5] [Footnote 5: Collins's Ode on the death of Thomson, the last written,I believe, of the poems which were published during his life-time.This Ode is also alluded to in the next stanza.]...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ifference.

To think how much pleasure there is! 
Have you pleasure from looking at the sky? have you pleasure from poems? 
Do you enjoy yourself in the city? or engaged in business? or planning a nomination and
 election? or with your wife and family? 
Or with your mother and sisters? or in womanly housework? or the beautiful maternal cares?

—These also flow onward to others—you and I flow onward,
But in due time, you and I shall take less interest in them. 

Your f...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...lain.
Why does she forgive me,
And whoever told her of my sins?
Or is that this voice that now repeats
The last poems that you wrote for me?



x x x

Instead of wisdom -- experience, bare,
That does not slake thirst, is not wet.
Youth's gone -- like a Sunday prayer..
Is it mine to forget?

On how many desert roads have searched I
With him who wasn't dear for me,
How many bows gave in church I
For him, who had well loved me.

I've bec...Read more of this...

by Padel, Ruth
...ian angel? Or is this arrant
Seeming, hallucination, thrown 
Up by that fly engineering a novel does
So beguilingly, or poems? Is this mad? 
Are there ways of dreaming I don't know?
Too bad. My soul has made its home
In you. I'm here and bare before you: shy,
In tears. But if I didn't heft my whole self up and hold it there - 
A crack-free mirror - loving you, or if I couldn't share
It, set it out in words, I'd die.
*
"I'll wait to hear from you. I must.Read more of this...

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