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Famous Primitive Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...the ship in the tempest dashes; 
On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight together; 
In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding—the howl of the wolf, the scream
 of the
 panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake—in summer visible through the
 clear
 waters, the great trout swimming; 
In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black buzzard floating
 slowly,
 high...Read more of this...



by Milosz, Czeslaw
...ntly
The good and bad of any situation.
You have an elegant, skeptical mind which enjoys pleasures
Quite unknown to primitive races.

Guided by this mind you cannot fail to see
The soundness of the advice we give you:
Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs
For this we have strict but wise rules.

3
There can be no question of force triumphant
We live in the age of victorious justice.

Do not mention force, or you will be accused
Of upholding fallen doctrines...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...acket of poetick Buff,
With which he doth his third Dimension Stuff.
Thus armed underneath, he over all
Does make a primitive Sotana fall;
And above that yet casts an antick Cloak,
Worn at the first Counsel of Antioch;
Which by the Jews long hid, and Disesteem'd,
He heard of by Tradition, and redeem'd.
But were he not in this black habit deck't,
This half transparent Man would soon reflect
Each colour that he past by; and be seen,
As the Chamelion, yellow, blew, or gr...Read more of this...

by Bly, Robert
...gs on one leg turns its body 
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost its wings whelping and walloping 
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and the dark.
And slowly the kind man comes closer loses his rage sits down at table.

So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness 
when you sit drawing or making books stapled with messages to the world 
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...able:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in o...Read more of this...



by Smart, Christopher
...l as other good things. 

For it is a good NOTHING in one's own eyes and in the eyes of fools. 

For æra in its primitive sense is but a weed amongst corn. 

For there is no knowing of times and seasons, in submitting them to God stands the Christian's Chronology. 

For Jacob's brown sheep wore the Golden fleece. 

For Shaving of the face was the invention of the Sodomites to make men look like women....Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...(after Spillane)


Let us be aware of the true dark gods
Acknowledgeing the cache of the crotch
The primitive pure and pwerful pink and grey
 private sensitivites
Wincing, marvelous in their sweetness, whence rises
 the future.

Therefore let us praise Miss Marilyn Monroe.
She has a noble attitude marked by pride and candor
She takes a noble pride in the female nature and torso
She articualtes her pride with directness and exuberance
She is honest ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...Primitive
I ate my fill of a whale that died
 And stranded after a month at sea. . . .
There is a pain in my inside.
 Why have the Gods afflicted me?
Ow! I am purged till I am a wraith!
 Wow! I am sick till I cannot see!
What is the sense of Religion and Faith :
 Look how the Gods have afflicted me!


 Pagan

How can the skin of rat or mo...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...d 
Wants her fit vessels pure; then strows the ground 
With rose and odours from the shrub unfumed. 
Mean while our primitive great sire, to meet 
His God-like guest, walks forth, without more train 
Accompanied than with his own complete 
Perfections; in himself was all his state, 
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits 
On princes, when their rich retinue long 
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold, 
Dazzles the croud, and sets them all agape. 
Nearer ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)

2
Passage, O soul, to India! 
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables. 

Not you alone, proud truths of the world! 
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science! 
But myths and fables of eld—Asia’s, Africa’s fables!
The far-darting beams of the spirit!—the unloos’d dreams! 
The deep diving bibles and legends; 
The daring plots of the poets—the elder religions; 
—O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over b...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ut silent, strange, devout—rais’d, glowing heads—extatic faces.)

11
I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings, 
The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen; 
The sacred imperial hymns of China, 
To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone;) 
Or to Hindu flutes, and the fretting twang of the vina,
A band of bayaderes. 

12
Now Asia, Africa leave me—Europe, seizing, inflates me; 
To organs huge, and bands, I hear as from vast concourses of voices, 
Lut...Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...would all be tested. 
Each pair there would have identical pitch.) 
--A pity not to have heard 
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird 
who sings above the broken gasoline pump 
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: 
three towers, five silver crosses. 
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered, 
blurr'dly and inconclusively, 
on what connection can exist for centuries 
between the crudest wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies o...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ab, purple, and light and dark
 green,
The rich coverlid of the grass—animals and birds—the private untrimm’d
 bank—the primitive apples—the pebble-stones, 
Beautiful dripping fragments—the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to
 call them to me, or think of them, 
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,) 
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me, 
This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry,...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ay their lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to a single purpose imperturbable and undaunted, men with the primitive guts of rebellion,
Only fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor’s sorrow on their brows and labor’s terrible pride in their blood, men with souls asking danger—only these will save and keep the four big brothers.

Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,
 Good-night to the kaiser.
The breakdown and the fade-away beg...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought,
The tribes who then roamed on her breast,
Her vigorous, primitive sons?

What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt
When he lay ...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...und any barren height a good retreat 
From any swarming street,
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted; 
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars 
Came out again to shine on joys and wars 
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom, 
He may have proved a world a sorry thing
In his imagining, 
And life a lighted highway to the tomb. 

Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread, 
His hopes to chaos led, 
He may have stumbled up there from the past, 
And with an aching str...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...ld 
'mid the plants.
Soon a shoot, succeeding it, riseth on high, and reneweth,

Piling-up node upon node, ever the primitive form;
Yet not ever alike: for the following leaf, as thou seest,

Ever produceth itself, fashioned in manifold ways.
Longer, more indented, in points and in parts more divided,

Which. all-deform'd until now, slept in the organ 
below,
So at length it attaineth the noble and destined perfection,

Which, in full many a tribe, fills thee with...Read more of this...

by Cullen, Countee
...no
further need to live."

Now suddenly a strange wild music smote
A chord long impotent in me; a note
Of jungles, primitive and subtle, throbbed
Against my echoing breast, and tom-toms sobbed
In every pulse-beat of my frame.The din
A hollow log bound with a python's skin
Can make wrought every nerve to ecstasy,
And I was wind and sky again, and sea,
And all sweet things that flourish, being free.

Till all at once the music changed its key.

And now it was o...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...on which shall be re-taught them, wake 
Upon the thrones of earth; but let them quake! 

XLVIII 

'Five millions of the primitive, who hold 
The faith which makes ye great on earth, implored 
A part of that vast all they held of old, — 
Freedom to worship — not alone your Lord, 
Michael, but you, and you, Saint Peter! Cold 
Must be your souls, if you have not abhorr'd 
The foe to Catholic participation 
In all the license of a Christian nation. 

XLIX 

'True! he allow'd ...Read more of this...

by Wilmot, John
...d was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.
Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united--What?
Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.
Yet Something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness's hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land.<...Read more of this...

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