Famous Putting Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones--
In fact, he's remarkably fat.
He doesn't haunt pubs--he has eight or nine clubs,
For he's the St. James's Street Cat!
He's the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impreccable back.
In the whole of St. James's the smartest of...Read more of this...

Soup

by Carl Sandburg
 I SAW a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

 When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon....Read more of this...

Every Time I Kiss You

by Nizar Qabbani
 Every time I kiss you
After a long separation
I feel
I am putting a hurried love letter
In a red mailbox....Read more of this...

Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --

by Emily Dickinson
 Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --
Not now --
The putting out of Eyes --
Just Sunrise --
Lest Day --
Day's Great Progenitor --
Outvie
Renunciation -- is the Choosing
Against itself --
Itself to justify
Unto itself --
When larger function --
Make that appear --
Smaller -- that Covered Vision -- Here --...Read more of this...

The Bustle in a House

by Emily Dickinson
 The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth --

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity....Read more of this...

Phantasmagoria CANTO VI ( Dyscomfyture )

by Lewis Carroll
 As one who strives a hill to climb,
Who never climbed before:
Who finds it, in a little time,
Grow every moment less sublime,
And votes the thing a bore: 

Yet, having once begun to try,
Dares not desert his quest,
But, climbing, ever keeps his eye
On one small hut against the sky
Wherein he hopes to rest: 

Who climbs till nerve and force are spent,
With...Read more of this...

Broken Dreams

by William Butler Yeats
 There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty -- for your sole sake
Heaven...Read more of this...

Just Walking Around

by John Ashbery
 What name do I have for you? 
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around, 

An object of curiosity to some, 
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around, 

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to...Read more of this...

Days of 1986

by Carolyn Kizer
 He was believed by his peers to be an important poet,
But his erotic obsession, condemned and strictly forbidden,
Compromised his standing, and led to his ruin. 

Over sixty, and a father many times over,
The objects of his attention grew younger and younger:
He tried to corrupt the sons of his dearest friends;
He pressed on them drinks and drugs,
And of course he...Read more of this...

Writing To Onegin

by Ruth Padel
 (After Pushkin) 
Look at the bare wood hand-waxed floor and long 
White dressing-gown, the good child's writing-desk 
And passionate cold feet
Summoning music of the night - tumbrils, gongs
And gamelans - with one neat pen, one candle
Puttering its life out hour by hour. 
Is "Tell Him I love him" never a good idea? You can't wish this
Unlived - this world...Read more of this...

Parted

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Sleepless I listen to the surge and drone 
And drifting roar of the town’s undertone; 
Till through quiet falling rain I hear the bells 
Tolling and chiming their brief tune that tells 
Day’s midnight end. And from the day that’s over
No flashes of delight I can recover; 
But only dreary winter streets, and faces 
Of people moving in loud...Read more of this...

Humanity i love you

by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you 
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride...Read more of this...

America

by Allen Ginsberg
 America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 
 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb. 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America...Read more of this...

Larry Levis

by Larry Levis
 My poem would eat nothing. 
I tried giving it water 
but it said no, 

worrying me. 
Day after day, 
I held it up to the llight, 

turning it over, 
but it only pressed its lips 
more tightly together. 

It grew sullen, like a toad 
through with being teased. 
I offered it money, 

my clothes, my car with a full...Read more of this...

That One

by Jorge Luis Borges
 Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving...Read more of this...

Unobtainable

by Hugo Williams
 Whether it was putting in an extra beat, 
or leaving one out, I couldn't tell. 
My heart seemed to have forgotten 
everything it ever knew 
about timing and co-ordination 
in its efforts to get through to someone 
on the other side of a wall. 
As I lay in bed, I could hear it 
hammering away inside my pillow, 
being...Read more of this...

Remembered

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
She sang, and I listened the whole song thro'.
(It was sweet, so sweet, the singing.)
The stars were out and the moon it grew
From a wee soft glimmer way out in the blue
To a bird thro' the heavens winging.
She sang, and the song trembled down to my breast,—
(It was sweet, so sweet the singing.)
As a dove just out of its fledgling...Read more of this...

Putting in the Seed

by Robert Frost
 You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper's on the table, and we'll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea);
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave...Read more of this...

Salvage

by Carl Sandburg
 GUNS on the battle lines have pounded now a year
between Brussels and Paris.
And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on
the great arches and naves and little whimsical
corners of the Churches of Northern France--Brr-rr!
I'm glad you're a dead man, William Morris, I'm glad
you're down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory
instead of a living man--I'm glad you're...Read more of this...

His Dream Of The Skyland

by Li Po
 The seafarers tell of the Eastern Isle of Bliss,
It is lost in a wilderness of misty sea waves.
But the Sky-land of the south, the Yueh-landers say,
May be seen through cracks of the glimmering cloud.
This land of the sky stretches across the leagues of heaven;
It rises above the Five Mountains and towers over the Scarlet Castle,

While, as if staggering before...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

What Has Happened?

by Bertolt Brecht
 The industrialist is having his aeroplane serviced.
The priest is wondering what he said in his sermon eight weeks ago
about tithes.
The generals are putting on civvies and looking like bank clerks.
Public officials are getting friendly.
The policeman points out the way to the man in the cloth cap.
The landlord comes to see whether the water supply is working.
The journalists write the...Read more of this...

The Dark and the Fair

by Stanley Kunitz
 A roaring company that festive night;
The beast of dialectic dragged his chains,
Prowling from chair to chair is the smoking light,
While the snow hissed against the windowpanes.

Our politics, our science, and our faith
Were whiskey on the tongue; I, being rent
By the fierce divisions of our time, cried death
And death again, and my own dying meant.

Out of her secret life, the...Read more of this...

The Englishman In Italy

by Robert Browning
 (PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco;
Now, open your eyes— 
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
As you tell your beads;
All the memories plucked at Sorrento
—The flowers,...Read more of this...

The Present

by Philip Levine
 The day comes slowly in the railyard 
behind the ice factory. It broods on 
one cinder after another until each 
glows like lead or the eye of a dog 
possessed of no inner fire, the brown 
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle 
a moment and sighing lets it thud 
down on the loading dock. In no time 
the...Read more of this...

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