Famous Very Personal Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Very Personal poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous very personal poems. These examples illustrate what a famous very personal poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Walt Whitman
1
MANHATTAN’S streets I saunter’d, pondering,
On time, space, reality—on such as these, and abreast with them, prudence.
2
After all, the last explanation remains to be made about prudence;
Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that suits immortality.
The Soul is of itself;
All verges to it—all has reference to what ensues;
All that a person does,...Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
You've read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
To understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are same and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better,...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes...Read more of this...
by
Anthony Hecht
Samuel Sewall, in a world of wigs,
Flouted opinion in his personal hair;
For foppery he gave not any figs,
But in his right and honor took the air.
Thus in his naked style, though well attired,
He went forth in the city, or paid court
To Madam Winthrop, whom he much admired,
Most godly, but yet liberal with the port.
And all the town admired for...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
when the body of a woman dissolves
within are the three feared faces
the man who dares to trace them comes
to grief - but nothing personal is meant
waves and particles transvest - vulva
breast and womb are sexless doors
beyond whose suck a sensual light
swings life round its little finger...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Chatterton
Begin, my muse, the imitative lay,
Aonian doxies sound the thrumming string;
Attempt no number of the plaintive Gay,
Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing.
If in the trammels of the doleful line
The bounding hail, or drilling rain descend;
Come, brooding Melancholy, pow'r divine,
And ev'ry unform'd mass of words amend.
Now the rough goat withdraws...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas near the Begum Kothie the battle began,
Where innocent blood as plentiful as water ran;
The Begum Kothie was a place of honour given to the 93rd,
Which heroically to a man they soon did begird.
And the 4th Punjaub Rifles were their companions in glory,
And are worthy of their names enrolled in story,
Because they performed prodigious wonders in the fight,
By...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Sitting in outpatients
With my own minor ills
Dawn’s depression lifts
To the lilt of amitryptilene,
A double dose for a day’s journey
To a distant ward.
The word was out that Simmons
Had died eighteen months after
An aneurism at sixty seven.
The meeting he proposed in his second letter
Could never happen: a few days later
A Christmas card in Gaelic - Nollaig Shona -
Then silence, an unbearable...Read more of this...
by
Anne Bradstreet
Proem.
1.1 Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
1.2 Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
1.3 Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,
1.4 And so has vow'd, whilst there is world or time.
1.5 So great's thy glory, and thine excellence,
1.6 The sound thereof raps every human sense
1.7 That men account it no...Read more of this...
by
Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same:...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
however foul the times or difficult the ways are
through those personal morasses this change of age
won’t let a single being (rich or poor) be free from
come spring the trees get on with their blossoming
you’d think they didn’t read the newspapers
you’d think the media hadn’t yet found a way
of getting to them conveying the miserable truths
this creaking into a new...Read more of this...
by
William Allingham
In Sussex here, by shingle and by sand,
Flat fields and farmsteads in their wind-blown trees,
The shallow tide-wave courses to the land,
And all along the down a fringe one sees
Of ducal woods. That 'dim discovered spire'
Is Chichester, where Collins felt a fire
Touch his sad lips; thatched Felpham roofs are these,
Where happy Blake found...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
How did you feel, you libertarians,
Who spent your talents rallying noble reasons
Around the saloon, as if Liberty
Was not to be found anywhere except at the bar
Or at a table, guzzling?
How did you feel, Ben Pantier, and the rest of you,
Who almost stoned me for a tyrant,
Garbed as a moralist,
And as a wry-faced ascetic frowning upon Yorkshire pudding,
Roast beef and...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Edward Teach was a native of Bristol, and sailed from that port
On board a privateer, in search of sport,
As one of the crew, during the French War in that station,
And for personal courage he soon gained his Captain's approbation.
'Twas in the spring of 1717, Captajn Harnigold and Teach sailed from Providence
For the continent of America, and no further...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
for Aaron Fogel
Politically-correct
personal computers
point and click.
President Clinton
(codename Peacock)
can't protect
crack pushing
Communist Party
cops pursuing
a care package
of peasant consciousness
in a car park.
Poverty's a crime,
and capital punishment
par for the course,
in this penal code.
A plausible cliffhanger
can't cure the paralyzed,
prevent cancer,
or prepare California
for Perry Como,
that peerless crooner.
Pitcher...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
for what my heart held clear
and didn’t have the wit to show
for what my path proposed
and got lost in its diversions
for what my beginnings dreamed
and my ends cannot lay hold of
for what promises i made
and have not had the shine to keep to
i ask your understanding
for what i have been
and could not be another
i ask your love...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
NO more of your guests, be they titled or not,
And cookery the first in the nation;
Who is proof to thy personal converse and wit,
Is proof to all other temptation....Read more of this...
by
Stephen Dunn
Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
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 were named after a...Read more of this...
by
John Matthew
Wild are my ways, wilder than you think
You will find me standing a little left of frame
You will find me a little away from the meeting place
I am that and much more, insignificant me.
Yes I am the one with the faraway look
Of sailors of vast dreamy oceans
I look at faraway seas and mountains
And wonder why they aren’t near.
There’s great...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Down, you mongrel, Death!
Back into your kennel!
I have stolen breath
In a stalk of fennel!
You shall scratch and you shall whine
Many a night, and you shall worry
Many a bone, before you bury
One sweet bone of mine!
When shall I be dead?
When my flesh is withered,
And above my head
Yellow pollen gathered
All the empty afternoon?
When sweet lovers pause and wonder
Whom am I that...Read more of this...
by
Frank O'Hara
1
If half of me is skewered
by grey crested birds
in the middle of the vines of my promise
and the very fact that I'm a poet
suffers my eyes
to be filled with vermilion tears
2
how much greater danger
from occasion and pain is my vitality
yielding like a tree on fire!--
for every day is another view
of the tentative past
grown secure in its foundry of shimmering
that's...Read more of this...
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