Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Thirties Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Bidart, Frank
...hide 
booths--

I thought of Cambridge:

 the lovely congruent elegance
 of Revolutionary architecture, even of

ersatz thirties Georgian

seemed alien, a threat, sign
of all I was not--

to bode order and lucidity

as an ideal, if not reality--

not this California plush, which

 also

I was not.

And so I made myself an Easterner,
finding it, after all, more like me
than I had let myself hope.

 And now, staring into the embittered face of 
 my father,

again, for t...Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...her hair dyed black, stuck up in a

Bun, her lipstick caked and smeared, drawling

From the corner of her mouth like a

Thirties gangsters’ moll, her true ambition.

"Kill him, kill him, the bastard!" she’d scream

As all Wakefield watched, "It’s Grotty,

Grotty’s at it again!" as pubs and clubs

Banned them, singly or together and they

Moved lodgings yet again, landlords and

Landladies left reeling behind broken doors.

Blood-smeared walls covered with a shiny

Pat...Read more of this...

by Kenyon, Jane
...to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.



5ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT


Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.


I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors -- those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few


moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.


Like ...Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)—
a sort of inheritance; white,
in your thirties now, and supposed
to supply me with vegetables,
but you don't; or you won't; or you can't
get the idea through your brain—
the world's worst gardener since Cain.
Titled above me, your gardens
ravish my eyes. You edge
the beds of silver cabbages
with red carnations, and lettuces
mix with alyssum. And then
umbrella ants arrive,
or it rains...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...pher to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding.
Those students are now in their thirties,
the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts
and bright crested blazers have gone
unprepared, though French-speaking, into
a world of liars, pimps, and brokers.
2.7% have died by their own hands,
and all the others have considered
the act at least once. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
the reading I gave of César Vallejo's
gr...Read more of this...



by Brautigan, Richard
...e, covered with flecks of glass, blood and whisky.

"What the **** you do that for?" he said.

 Now in his late thirties Pard works at a print shop for

$1. 35 an hour. It is an avant-garde print shop. They print

poetry and experimental prose. They pay him $1. 35 an hour

for operating a linotype machine. A $1. 35 linotype operator

is hard to find, outside of Hong Kong or Albania.

 Sometimes when he goes down there, they don't even h...Read more of this...

by Kinnell, Galway
...wamp,
passed the cellar hole holding
the remains of the 1850s farmhouse
that had slid down into it by stages
in the thirties and forties, followed
the overgrown logging road
and came to the trees. I climbed up
to the perch, and this time looked
not into the distance but at
the tree itself, its trunk
contorted by the terrible struggle
of that time when it had its hard time.
After the trauma it grows less solid.
It may be some such time now comes upon m...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Thirties poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs