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Famous Unshaven Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...book-review,
you take an empty seat. Opposite you
a voluble immigrant family
is 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 can...Read more of this...
by Hacker, Marilyn



...ing
of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains
as hard and open as a herdsman's face
sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.

Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,
the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse
of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard
of treaties and white papers as we lose
sight of the single human through the cause.

So every spring these branches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—p...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek
...
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs,...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...tered out

During the six years in India, studying Bengali at Shantiniketan.

He tottered from the plane, penniless and unshaven,

To hide away in the seediest bedsit Beeston could boast

Where night turned to day and vaguely he applied 

For jobs as clerk and court usher and drank in pubs with yobs.

When the crisis came – "I feel my head coming off my body’ –

I was ready and unready, making the necessary calls

To get a bed, to keep him on the ward, to visit and reassure 
...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...And suppose the darlings get to Mantua, 
suppose they cheat the crypt, what next? Begin 
with him, unshaven. Though not, I grant you, a 
displeasing cockerel, there's egg yolk on his chin. 
His seedy robe's aflap, he's got the rheum. 
Poor dear, the cooking lard has smoked her eye. 
Another Montague is in the womb 
although the first babe's bottom's not yet dry. 
She scrolls a weekly letter to her Nurse 
who dares to send a smock through Balthasar, 
and o...Read more of this...
by Kumin, Maxine



..., from all
that history, I found Murray, my papa's
buddy, in his greasy truck shop, polishing
replacement parts. Short, unshaven, puffed,
he strutted the filthy aisles,
a tiny Ghengis Khan. He sent out for soup
and sandwiches. The world turned on barley,
pickled meats, yellow mustard, kasha,
rye breads. It rained in October, rained
so hard I couldn't walk and smoke, so I
chewed pepsin chewing gum. The rain
spoiled Armistice Day in Lancaster, Pa.
The open cars overflowed, girl...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...Squat, unshaven, full of gas,
Joseph Samuels, former clerk
in four large cities, out of work,
waits in the darkened underpass.

In sanctuary, out of reach,
he stares at the fading light outside:
the rain beginning: hears the tide
that drums along the empty beach.

When drops first fell at six o'clock,
the bathers left. The last car's gone.
Sun's final rays reflect ...Read more of this...
by Kees, Weldon
...dely forc'd.
  Tereu

  Unreal City
  Under the brown fog of a winter noon
  Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
  Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants                                210
  C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
  Asked me in demotic French
  To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
  Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

  At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
  Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
  Like a taxi throbbing ...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu
 Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
 At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...the bed groan and his shoes drop 
one by one. You can have it, he says. 

The moonlight streams in the window 
and his unshaven face is whitened 
like the face of the moon. He will sleep 
long after noon and waken to find me gone. 

Thirty years will pass before I remember 
that moment when suddenly I knew each man 
has one brother who dies when he sleeps 
and sleeps when he rises to face this life, 

and that together they are only one man 
sharing a heart that always labou...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry