Famous Shoebox Poems by Famous Poets

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

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August 17th

by Anne Sexton
 Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health.

Surely I will be disquieted
by the hospital, that body zone--
bodies wrapped in elastic bands,
bodies cased in wood or used like telephones,
bodies crucified up onto their crutches,
bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs,
bodies vomiting up their juice like detergent, Here in this house
there are other bodies.
Whenever...Read more of this...

Take One Home For The Kiddies

by Philip Larkin
 On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -
Mam, get us one of them to keep.

Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -
Mam, we're playing funerals now....Read more of this...

The Firebombers

by Anne Sexton
 We are America. 
We are the coffin fillers. 
We are the grocers of death. 
We pack them in crates like cauliflowers. 

The bomb opens like a shoebox. 
And the child? 
The child is certainly not yawning. 
And the woman? 
The woman is bathing her heart. 
It has been torn out of her
and as a last act 
she is rinsing...Read more of this...

The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball

by Thomas Lux
 each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets...Read more of this...

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

by John Ashbery
 The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits 
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How 
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she 
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy...Read more of this...

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