Special Section
Favorite Poems? What's on Your List?
We asked poets to send us their list of the "Top 10 Poems of All Time."
We know they would choose different poems on any given day.
Perhaps our friend Silvia Curbelo expressed it best--
Well, this was a tough one. I started by making a list of my 10 favorite poets (which in itself was incredibly hard to narrow down), and then tried to figure out a favorite poem from each. But that didn’t work at all. Along the way I discovered while I might love and admire a poet’s entire oeuvre, it was often the case there would not be ONE poem by that poet I could call a top-10 favorite. But it was a start, and I came up with four poems from the list that way. Interestingly, I also quickly discovered the inverse is true. There are many many poems I love written by people whose books and overall work I generally don’t find that compelling.
So… in the end, this is what floated to the top of my head. I was dying to include a few runners up, but resisted the temptation.
We have selected a poem from each list—hover over the poems to see the link—for you to read should you care to.
We asked poets to send us their list of the "Top 10 Poems of All Time."
We know they would choose different poems on any given day.
Perhaps our friend Silvia Curbelo expressed it best--
Well, this was a tough one. I started by making a list of my 10 favorite poets (which in itself was incredibly hard to narrow down), and then tried to figure out a favorite poem from each. But that didn’t work at all. Along the way I discovered while I might love and admire a poet’s entire oeuvre, it was often the case there would not be ONE poem by that poet I could call a top-10 favorite. But it was a start, and I came up with four poems from the list that way. Interestingly, I also quickly discovered the inverse is true. There are many many poems I love written by people whose books and overall work I generally don’t find that compelling.
So… in the end, this is what floated to the top of my head. I was dying to include a few runners up, but resisted the temptation.
We have selected a poem from each list—hover over the poems to see the link—for you to read should you care to.
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Silvia Curbelo
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías by Federico García Lorca To Go to Lvov by Adam Zagajewski Lentes (Lenses) by Delfin Prats Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert Trowbridge Street by Octavio Paz The River of Bees by W.S. Merwin Refugees by Beckian Fritz Goldberg My President by Danez Smith Our Dust by C. D. Wight Without by Donald Hall Denise Duhamel Shooter by Jan Beatty Rape by Jane Cortez A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay The Closet by Bill Knott Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux The Race by Sharon Olds Ringing the Bells by Ann Sexton Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas The Past by David Trinidad Jim Daniels Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight Did I Miss Anything? by Tom Wayman Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye At the Reading by John Woods Bless Their Hearts by Richard Newman Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda Selecting a Reader by Ted Kooser The Plum Trees by Mary Oliver The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada Jesus on a Tortilla by Lee Upton Ilhem Issaoui Rain Song by Badr Shakir Al-sayyab I shall not live in vain by Emily Dickinson The Wasteland by T.S Eliot Down by the Salley Gardens by William Butler Yeats Autobiographia Literaria by Frank O'hara The Moon by Joseph Fasano Style by Charles Bukowski Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying by Noor Hindi I lied and said I was Busy by Brittin Oakman The Melting Star Anatoly Molotov Peter Meinke An impossible list for a poet and teacher, but this evening these burn brightly in my memory—in my heart and brain. Tomorrow there certainly will be others, but let’s go with these. Sonnet XVIII, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? by William Shakespeare The Sun Rising by John Donne The Tyger by William Blake I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson Lullaby by W. H. Auden The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks Fleda Brown The Windhover by Gerald Manly Hopkins Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman I Heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Prufrock by T.S. Eliot One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Let Me Not to the Marriage by William Shakespeare The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats The Oven Bird by Robert Frost Arturo Desimone Poem of the Deep Song (Poema del Cante Jondo) by Federico García Lorca Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) for Belle-Kiss, by/from Shlomo Ha-Melech Nerve-snowfall of Angst by César Vallejo Daddy by Sylvia Plath Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens Preface to a 21 vol. Suicide Note by LeRoi Jones The Night of Santiago by Leonard Cohen Lamentation for the turtledove of Butch Buchanan, by Sidney West The Age by Osip Mandelstam Amazing Eyes of Rita by Mahmoud Darwish Julie Marie Wade Splittings by Adrienne Rich wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton Bay Poem from Berkeley by Sandra Cisneros I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds Persimmons by Li-Young Lee In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver Ellen West by Frank Bidart Deepstep, Come Shining by C.D. Wright When I Was a Lesbian by Denise Duhamel Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen Michael Hathaway if there are any heavens by E.E. Cummings Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens His Necessary Darkness by Nancy Sullivan Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe Four Little Foxes by Lew Sarett Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Leroi Jones Interlude III by Karl Shapiro Taught Me Purple by Evelyn Tooley Hunt Molly Peacock Concerning a Young Woman by Sappho, 700-323 BC Adonis in the Underworld by Praxilla, 700-323 BC Epitaph on a Bride's Tomb by Erinna, 323-31 BC Wulf and Edwacer (Anglo Saxon), by Anonymous,10th Century To the Tune Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch by Li Ch'ing Chao, 10th century I Picked an Azalea by Izumi Shikibu, 10th century Idleness by Lu Yu, 12th century Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare, 16th century Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt, 16th century Love III by George Herbert, 17th century Sean Sexton Loveliest of Trees by A E Houseman The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney Beauty by BH Fairchild Anthem (A kind of preamble to his longer poem, “Grass”) by Buck Ramsey Lilacs In the Dooryard Blooming by Walt Whitman Asphodel that Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams The entire Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell Dearest M— by Hayden Carruth White Egrets by Derek Walcott Preludes by TS Eliot Lynne Viti Sonnet 49 by William Shakespeare A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne Spring and Fall: to a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins The Oven Bird or Design or Birches by Robert Frost Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens Church Going by Philiip Larkin We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks When all the Others Were Away at Mass by Seamus Heaney Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge by Martin Espada Conflation by Andrea Cohen Wandajune Bishop-Towle The Odyssey by Homer As the sweet apple blushes by Sappho Odi et Amo (I love and I hate) by Catullus A charm invests a face by Dickinson Gato que brincas na rua" (Cat, you tumble down the street) by Fernando Pessoa L'union Libre" (Free Union) by Andre Breton To Autumn by Keats Song of Myself by Whitman To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet And senryu writer Dee Evetts Jeff Santosuosso Rime of the Ancient Mariner - by Coleridge The Deer Lay Down Their Bones by Robinson Jeffers The Seventh by Attila Jozsef My Childhood Home I See Again - Abraham Lincoln (yes, that A Lincoln) (so many by) Edna St. Vincent Millay Alicante Lullaby by Sylvia Plath The Raven by EA Poe Self-Portrait as Mae West One-Liner by Paisley Rekdal Chicago by Carl Sandberg Track by Tomas Transtromer Gianna Russo A Bird Came Down the Walk by Emily Dickinson Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Elegy for Jane by Theodore Roetke The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck Incident by Natasha Trethewey When My Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay Bruce Weber Woman From Starlake by Lenny DellaRocca Naima by Steve Dalachinsjy Tomatoes by Steven Dobyns Il Pleut by Guilaume Apollonaire Almost any of the later poems of Ryuichi Tamura Crowds by Charles Baudelaire Drunken Morning by Rimbaud When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d byWalt Whitman Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams, Requiem by Anna Akmatova Caron Andregg Be advised, there will be inevitable conflation between "Greatest" and “Favorite-est.” Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt Paradise Lost by John Milton To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats Orpheus Euridyce. Hermes by Rainer Maria Rilke I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin* Study for the World's Body by David St. John *Definitely a "favorite-est." Steve Klepetar The Spring Song from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer Sonnet 130 My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun by Shakespeare Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson Riddle by Sylvia Plath The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Anne Sexton The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost Saturday’s Child by Countee Cullen The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens Catherine Mazodier Digging by Seamus Heaney Le bateau ivre by Rimbaud One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Atemwende by Paul Celan Advice to Myself by Adrienne Rich The Waking by Theodore Roethke This Be the Verse by Phillip Larkin Eclats d'Août by Philippe Jaccottet Als das Kind Kind war by Peter Handke Snow by Archibald MacNeice Melissa Fite Johnson I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds Daystar by Rita Dove Loading a Boar by David Lee Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay 25th High School Reunion by Linda Pastan Tea by Leila Chatti moonchild by Lucille Clifton For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God by Anne Sexton The Yellow Dot by Robert Bly Kathleen Hellen Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke Spring and Fall by Gerald Manly Hopkins jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton The Tomb At Akr Çaar by Ezra Pound A Winter Night by Tomas Tranströmer The Night of the Shirts by W.S. Merwin The Idea of Ancestry by Etheridge Knight Under One Small Star by Wislawa Szymborka Romance Sonámbulo by Federico Garcia Lorca The Anactoria Poemby Sappho Angela Torres A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert First Thanksgiving by Sharon Olds When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller Poetry by Pablo Neruda Persimmons by Li Young Lee Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt by Ross Gay When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann Yaddyra Peralta The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop This Morning I Pray for My Enemies by Joy Harjo Wigphrastic by Terrance Hayes Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky Candelabra with Heads by Nicole Sealey Ode to Eating Pomegranates in Brooklyn by Patrick Rosal My Music by Campbell McGrath Rain Effect by Mary Ruefle Ending the Estrangement by Ross Gay Our Lady of Suyapa by Roy G. Guzman John King The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk by Charles Simic Pegasus by Joy Priest Ourselves or Nothing by Carolyn Forché Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco Layover by Ericka Dawson Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins The Rape Joke by Patricia Lockwood Poem to the Reader by Sharon Olds Deaf Girl Playing by James Tate David Trinidad At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop I watched the Moon around the House by Emily Dickinson G-9 by Tim Dlugos, On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge by Audre Lorde Ode to the Dead Millionaire (trans. Ilan Stavans) by Pablo Neruda, A Step Away from Them by Frank O’Hara The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath This Dark Apartment by James Schuyler Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound by Anne Sexton The Pink Locust by William Carlos Williams Yvonne Zipter The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop In Each Other's Arms, Lightning by Minnie Bruce Pratt Morning Song by Sylvia Plath Do You Love Me? by Robert Wrigley History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving by Reginald Dwayne Betts My Life by Somebody Else by Mark Strand The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats Bullet Points by Jericho Brown The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver |
Linda Pastan
I am NOT going to list the ten top poems "of all time" but ten of "my favorite" poems, at the moment. 73rd sonnet, That time of year… by Shakespeare Jerusalem, by William Blake Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold The Cricket sang and set the sun... by Emily Dickinson Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Heroic Simile by Robert Hass David Kirby The Metamorphoses, Book 4 ("The Transformation of Cadmus”) by Ovid The Inferno, Canto I ("The Dark Wood of Error”) by Dante Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats Be Drunk by Baudelaire The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden Failing and Falling by Jack Gilbert What I Want by George Bilgere Fubar by Lucia Perillo Mambo Cadillac by Barbara Hamby Babara Hamby Metamorphoses by Ovid The Song of Solomon Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats Hamlet's "What a Piece of Work is Man" speech or the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare Song of Myself by Walt Whitman Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud Bee Poems by Sylvia Plath Dear Lovely Death by Langston Hughes Ode to the Maggot by Yusef Komunyakaa Traci Brimhall I definitely can't say these are of all time! But when I started to handwrite poems in a journal, these are some of the first: Robert Frost's "Directive" Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Song" John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV" Emily Dickinson's #405 Frederico Garcia Lorca's "Ghazal of Dark Death" Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" Rainer Maria Rilke's Third Duino Elegy Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" Galway Kinnel's "Little Sleeps'-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" Adrienne Rich "Diving Into the Wreck" Shiva Bhusal Boast of Quietness by Jorge Luis Borges If by Rudyard Kipling The Second Coming by W.B Yeats If you forget me by Pablo Neruda Paagal, a Nepali poem by Laxmi Prasad Devkota Mero Chowk, a Nepali poem by Bhupi Sherchan The end and the beginning by Wisława Szymborska The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski No man is an island by John Donne Ann Pedone Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth A by Louis Zukofsky Sea Rose by H. D. The Rain by Robert Creeley Canto XIII by Ezra Pound The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson I’m Reading Your Mind by Jorie Graham Dream by Eileen Myles 46 by Sappho 37 by Catullus Brendan Walsh Ode To Kanye West In Two Parts, Ending In A Chain Of Mothers Rising From The River by Hanif Abdurraqib Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee Standing on Earth, Among the Cows by Malena Morling How to Like It by Stephen Dobyns Otherwise by Jane Kenyon Late Fragment by Raymond Carver Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop A Blessing by James Wright Alison Stone The Duino Elegies by Rilke Snapshots of a Daughter in Law by Adrienne Rich Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart A Dedication to Hunger by Louise Gluck Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes by Emily Dickinson The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop Motown Crown by Patricia Smith Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith Lola Haskins Sonnet on his Blindness by Milton Batter my Heart by John Donne Because I could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson Song of Myself by Walt Whitman Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight by Vachel Lindsay The Second Coming by WB Yeats Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden My Last Duchess by Robert Browning The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes The Ballad of William Sycamore by Stephen Vincent Benet Jennifer Martelli Poem by Elizabeth Bishop Carrowmore by Lucie Brock-Broido Victoria Chang—died unwillingly on by Victoria Chang jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz Low Tide, Late August by Marie Howe Kitchen by Laura Jensen Dothead by Amit Majmudar The Bee Meeting or The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath Gods by Anne Sexton Bruce Bond At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop The Peacock Room by Robert Hayden An Ordinary Evening in New Haven by Wallace Stevens Trilogy by H.D. For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell Midsummerby Derek Walcott Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley The Last One by W.S. Merwin Saint Judas by James Wright Doug Ramspeck Averno by Louise Glück Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly The History of the American West by Kevin Prufer summer, somewhere by Danez Smith Winter Stars by Larry Levis Scheherazade by Richard Siken Religion by Robert Wrigley Bowl of Lilacs by Henri Cole Telemachus by Ocean Vuong A Story About the Body by Robert Hass Steve Kronen To Autumn by John Keats There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson Desert Places by Robert Frost A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day by John Donne The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop This Anxious Pleasing Being by Richard Wilbur Psalm and Lament by Donald Justice A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden To Postumus - ii.14 by Horace (the David Ferry translation) Holly Iglesias New Year’s Eve Letter to Friends by Jean Follain Signs for Travelers by David Clewell St. Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney The Gift by Li-Young Lee When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos Para Hablar con los Muertos (To Talk with the Dead) by Jorge Teillier Sorrow’s Flower by Christian Wiman The Box This Comes In by C.D. Wright A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats A Flame by Adam Zagajewski Stephen Gibson By W. H. Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts In Memory of W.B. Yeats In Praise of Limestone The Shield of Achilles September 1, 1939 Woods Volcanoes (from the Russian of Akhmadulina) By John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale & Ode on a Grecian Urn By William Butler Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium Peter Grandbois The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand The Infinities by Joanna Klink Like an Angel by Nin Andrews Animism by Joshua McKinney Dancing by Robert Hass* Wild Geese by Mary Oliver Daybreak by Galway Kinnel Seen from Above by Wislawa Szymborska The Same Inside by Anna Stir * Click here to see Robert Hass read "Dancing" during the SoFloPoJo Miami Book Fair interview Ernesto Cepeda Gate A-4 by Naomi Shiab Nye’ She Being Brand by e.e. cummings The Journey Has Always Been by Jimmy Santiago Baca Mexican American Sonnet by Iliana Rocha What Do Women Want by Kim Adonnizio Nashville by Tiana Clark Half Mexican by Juan Felipe Herrera The Wild Divine by Ada Limón Drought by Sandra Cisneros Anthem with Emerald and Gold by Jessica Abughattas Virgil Suarez Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrel Howl by Alen Ginsburg Warnings by Nicanor Parra Walking Around by Pablo Neruda O Taste & See by Denise Levertov We Be Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks The Colonel by Carolyn Forche Adultery by James Dickey The Raven by Edgar A. Poe Terese Svoboda Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Musée des Beaux Arts by Auden Meeting the British, Madoc: A Mystery by Paul Muldoon Sun-up by Lola Ridge Crucifixion by Langston Hughes black herman’s last asrah levitation at magic city, Atlanta 2010 by Latasha Nevada Diggs MDCCCL by Caroline Knox Red by Anne Carson I Love to Singa by Paul Beatty Amy Poague Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye The Gate by Marie Howe Aerialists by Mary Oliver Fragment Thirty-Six by H.D. Alla Tha's All Right, but by June Jordan To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens by Molly Brodak To Be Posted on 21st Street, Between Eye and Pennsylvania by Minnie Bruce Pratt Carmine Di Biase Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Night Mail by W. H. Auden Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen Summoned by Bells by John Betjeman Alan Catlin Haydn’s Skull Returning by David Chorlton The Colonel by Carolyn Forche Howl by Allen Ginsberg A Valedictory: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne The Incantation of Frieda K by Kate Braverman The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner- by Randall Jarrell Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London by Dylan Thomas A Bummer by Michael Casey Adonais: An Elegy on the death of John Keats by Percy B. Shelley Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen Sarah White Safe in their alabaster chambers by Emily Dickinson I'll tell you how the sun rose by Emily Dickinson The American Sublime by Wallace Stevens As Kingfishers catch fire by G.M. Hopkins In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern The Farewel (for Philip Levine) by Gerald Stern Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop The Good Morrow by John Donne Things Shouldn't be So Hard by Kay Ryan Zone by Guillaume Appolonaire Hillary Sideris Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden Dream Song 14 by John Berryman American Sonnet 61 and American Sonnet 70 by Wanda Coleman Dockery & Son by Philip Larkin The Rain Streaked Avenues of Central Queens by D. Nurske The Dead Remember Brooklyn by D. Nurkse My Weariness of Epic Proportions by Charles Simic Prodigy by Charles Simic Listen, Daisy, When I'm Dead, Although by Fernando Pessoa Laurie Byro Traveling Through the Dark and A ritual to read to one another by William Stafford Making a Fist by Naomi Nye From a Window by Christian Wiman The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig A Blessing by James Wright Daddy by Sylvia Plath The Tempest by William Shakespeare The Love Song of J. A . Prufrock by TS Eliot The River Merchant’s Wife by Ezra Pound Jesse Glass The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake The Mental Traveler by William Blake The Grey Monk by William Blake The Book of Urizen byWilliam Blake Milton by William Blake Jerusalem by William Blake The Four Zoas by William Blake Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart In Parentheses by David Jones Thunder, The Perfect Mind by Anon. Norman “Buzz” Minnick The Merchant's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, Sonnet 23 (As an unperfect actor on the stage) by William Shakespeare Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats Song of Myself by Walt Whitman 76 (Exultation is the Going…) by Emily Dickinson We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar Second Coming by W. B. Yeats Let American Be America Again by Langston Hughes High Windows by Philip Larkin Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight |
Some SoFloPoJo Editors List Their picks for the Top 10 Poems of All Time
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Jennifer Greenberg
By Fire by Sharon Olds For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash by Joy Harjo So Penseroso by Ogden Nash How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib Listen by e e cummings The Cows on Killing Day by Les Murray The Sounds of the Universe Coming in my Window by Jack Kerouac Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda Duende by Tracy K Smith Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath Nicole Tallman Her Kind by Anne Sexton Tulips by Sylvia Plath Les roses sont entrées by Renee Vivien Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden What the Living Do by Marie Howe Je t’aime by Paul Eluard Rain by Jack Gilbert Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda The Snowman by Wallace Stevens Susannah Simpson Sonnet 17 by PabloNeruda Now Is The Time by Hafiz The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo The Guest House by Rumi Otherwise by Jane Kenyon Ah, Ah by Joy Harjo Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry Barbra Nightingale The Colonel by Carolyn Forche Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens The Idea of Order in Key West by Wallace Stevens Tonight I Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda Daddy by Sylvia Plath The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich Gary Kay Dream Song #5 by John Berryman I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop My Last Duchess by Robert Browning Harlot's House by Oscar Wilde Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy Aunt Jennifer's Tigers by Adrienne Rich Meryl Stratford Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop: note, passed to superman by Lucille Clifton My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson Rant by Diane di Prima Fragment Thirty-six by H.D The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich Not Waving, but Drowning by Stevie Smith In Praise of My Sister by Wislawa Szymborska We Shall Not Escape Hell by Marina Tsvetaeva |
Stacie Kiner
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne The Sensual World by Louise Gluck Daffodils by Ted Hughes For My Lover Returning to His Wife by Anne Sexton What Work Is by Philip Levine I Am On My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For by Sandra Cisneros Lenny DellaRocca Soldier Asleep at the Tomb by Gjertrud Schnackenberg Black Mare by Lynda Hull Mistral by John Koethe Prayer for Sunlight and Hunger by Traci Brimhall The Sheep Child by James Dickey High Windows by Philip Larkin Howl by Allen Ginsberg Bulimia by Denise Duhamel Waiting for the Barbarians by Constantine P. Cafavy Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight by Dylan Thomas Caridad Moro Gronliere The River Merchant’s Wife by Li Po (Translated by Pound) Wild Geese by Mary Oliver Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Daffodils by Ted Hughes One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Double Image by Anne Sexton Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden To The Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara Michael Mackin O'Mara Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith Have You Prayed by Li Young Lee Thinking of the Lost World by Randall Jarrell When the Burning Begins by Patricia Smith When I Have Fears by John Keats Magdalene – The Seven Devils by Marie Howe Order No 2 to the Army of the Arts by Vladimir Mayakovsky Harmonie Du Soir by Charles Baudelaire Fugue of Death by Paul Celan Of the Dark Doves by Federico Garcia Lorca Patricia Whiting The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats Under Ben Bulben by W.B. Yeats The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Digging by Seamus Heaney Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens A Book Full of Pictures by Charles Simic The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins No Man Is an Island by John Donne Don Burns The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats After a Journey by Thomas Hardy Ithaca by C. P. Cavafy Deception Island by W. S. Merwin The Laughing Thrush by W. S. Merwin The Lost Land by Eavan Boland Any and all by by Matsuo Basho The Gift by Li-Young Lee Poetry Reading by Anna Swir Sonnet 116 (Let me not...) by William Shakespeare |