Famous Unimportant Poems by Famous Poets

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

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All My Pretty Ones

...ho cannot smile.
Is this your father's father, this Commodore 
in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile
has made it unimportant who you are looking for. 
I'll never know what these faces are all about. 
I lock them into their book and throw them out. 

Tlis is the yellow scrapbook that you began
the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly
as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran 
the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me 
and Prohibition; news where the H...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne


Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else Except Richer

...aying that health and happi-
ness are everything and money isn't essential,
Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant
money to maintain their health and happiness they starve
to death so they can't go around any more sneering at good
old money, which is nothing short of providential....Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

Desesperanto

...already unwrapping garlicky
sausages—an unshaven man and his two
red-eared sons.
You once wrote: it is true,
awful, and unimportant, finally
that if the opportunity occurs
some of the exiles become storm-troopers;
and you try, culpably, to project these three
into some torch-lit future, filtering out
their wrangling (one of your languages) about
the next canto in their short odyssey.

The next canto in your short odyssey
will open, you know this, in yet another
hotel room. Th...Read more of this...
by Hacker, Marilyn

Five Bells

...th can fly the pygmy strait - 
Nothing except the memory of some bones 
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; 
And unimportant things you might have done, 
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, 
And all have now forgotten - looks and words 
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, 
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales 
Of Irish kings and English perfidy, 
And dirtier perfidy of publicans 
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst. 
Five bells. 

Then I sa...Read more of this...
by Slessor, Kenneth

Milkweed

...Remember how unimportant 
they seemed, growing loosely 
in the open fields we crossed 
on the way to school. We 
would carve wooden swords 
and slash at the luscious trunks 
until the white milk started 
and then flowed. Then we'd 
go on to the long day 
after day of the History of History 
or the tables of numbers and order 
as the clock slowly paid 
out the moments. Th...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip


Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...aving seen
As darkness resumes. A perverse light whose
Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its
Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant.
Francesco, your hand is big enough
To wreck the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything i...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

The Fall of Rome

...mayExtol the Ancient Disciplines,But the muscle-bound MarinesMutiny for food and pay. Caesar's double-bed is warmAs an unimportant clerkWrites I DO NOT LIKE MY WORKOn a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity,Little birds with scarlet legs,Sitting on their speckled eggs,Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vastHerds of reindeer move acrossMiles and miles of golden moss,Silently and very fast....Read more of this...
by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)

The unquiet city

...igment
seeped through that censorious cloth
we have plants one of us has a budgie
and I have three fish the details
are unimportant God does not come here often
we would be suspicious if he
did without an identity card
we collect each others' mail
remind each other of garbage
days and are frightened
of the louts from the skating rink
but in the night I leave
my curtains open and air
my pendant tremulous breasts...Read more of this...
by Mansell, Chris

Two Tramps In Mud Time

...s that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tend...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

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