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Famous Twenty Five Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
 in capitals:
SPRING
 SPRING
 SPRING...
And me -- poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
 every day
 for two liras--
why,
 since spring
 has come, am I
 still sitting here
 like a ragged 
 black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
 I fl...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim



...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 when will you be angelic? 
When will you tak...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...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 s...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...“I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid”. Hattie McDaniel.

I’m the savage in the jungle
and the busboy in the town.
I’m the one who jumps the highest 
when the Boss man comes around.

I’m the maid who wields the wooden broom.
I’m the black boot polish cheeks.
I’m the big fat Lawdy Mama
who always laughs before she speak...Read more of this...
by Lindley, John
...Out of a cell into this darkened space --
The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!...Read more of this...
by Masters, Edgar Lee



..."When I hit her on the head, it was good,

and then I did it to her a couple of times,--
but it was funny,--afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it ...

Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line.

Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her ...

The who...Read more of this...
by Bidart, Frank
...People sit numbly at the counter 
waiting for breakfast or service. 
Today it's Hartford, Connecticut 
more than twenty-five years after 
the last death of Wallace Stevens. 
I have come in out of the cold 
and wind of a Sunday morning 
of early March, and I seem to be 
crying, but I'm only freezing 
and unpeeled. The waitress brings 
me hot tea in a cracke...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...Her teacher's certainty it must be Mabel
Made Maple first take notice of her name.
She asked her father and he told her, "Maple—
Maple is right."
"But teacher told the school
There's no such name."
"Teachers don't know as much
As fathers about children, you tell teacher.
You tell her that it's M-A-P-L-E.
You ask her if she knows a maple tree.
Well, you wer...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert
...So goodbye, Mrs. Brown, 
I am going out of town, 
Over dale, over down, 
Where bugs bite not, 
Where lodgers fight not, 
Where below your chairmen drink not, 
Where beside your gutters stink not; 
But all is fresh and clean and gay, 
And merry lambkins sport and play, 
And they toss with rakes uncommonly short hay, 
Which looks as if it had been sown only ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter
...THE PUDDING MASTER OF



 STANLEY BASIN





Tree, snow and rock beginnings, the mountain in back of the

lake promised us eternity, but the lake itself was filled with

thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore

and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time.

 The minnows were an Idaho tourist attraction. They

should have been made into a ...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...SANDBOX MINUS JOHN

 DILLINGER EQUALS WHAT?





Often I return to the cover of Trout Fishing in America. I

took the baby and went down there this morning. They were

watering the cover with big revolving sprinklers. I saw some

bread lying on the grass. It had been put there to feed the

pigeons.

 The old Italians are always doing things like that. The
...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...I am only nineteen
My whole life is changing

Tonight I see her
Shuttered eyes in my dreams

I cannot pretend she's never been
My stitches pull and threaten to snap

My own body a witness
Leaking blood to sheets milk to shirts

My stretch marks
Record that birth

Though I feel like somebody is dying

I stand up in my bed
And wail like a banshee

II
On the ...Read more of this...
by Kay, Jackie
...Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as w...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...I let myself in at the kitchen door.
"It's you," she said. "I can't get up. Forgive me 
Not answering your knock. I can no more 
Let people in than I can keep them out. 
I'm getting too old for my size, I tell them. 
My fingers are about all I've the use of 
So's to take any comfort. I can sew: 
I help out with this beadwork what I can." 
"That's a smart p...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert
...Dürer would have seen a reason for living
 in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
 with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep
 flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse ...Read more of this...
by Moore, Marianne
...I dance in circles holding
the moth of the marriage,
thin, sticky, fluttering
its skirts, its webs.
The moth oozing a tear,
or is it a drop of urine?
The moth, grinning like a pear,
or is it teeth
clamping the iron maiden shut?

The moth,
who is my mother,
who is my father,
who was my lover,
floats airily out of my hands
and I dance slower,
pulling off the...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...1
Only today and just for this minute,
when the sunslant finds its true angle,
you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle
our gentle, fluffy tree—
suddenly the green summer is momentary...
Autumn is my favorite season—
why does it change clothes and withdraw?

This week the house went on the market—
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a r...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert
...The Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we know,
Deeper into life;
Right into the marrow
And through the bone.
Along the back of the baby tortoise
The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.

Five, and five again, and five again,
And round...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.
...In silence the heart raves.It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning.I was ten, skinny, red-headed,

Freckled.In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something

Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart.It
Thickens your blood.It stops your breath.It

Ma...Read more of this...
by Warren, Robert Penn
...There here are words of radical advice for a young man looking for a job;
Young man, be a snob.
Yes, if you are in search of arguments against starting at the bottom,
Why I've gottem.
Let the personnel managers differ;
It,s obvious that you will get on faster at the top than at the bottom because
there are more people at the bottom than at the top so natur...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry