W. W. Norton College Books : English : Modern Poems

Reading Poems
Words and Word Order
Speaker and Tone
Figurative Language
Sound and Form
Stanza and Verse Paragraph
Poetic Kinds, Forms, and Stanzas: A Glossary
Index of Terms
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Song of Myself
- 1–14
- 46–52
When I Heard at the Close of the Day
Cavalry Crossing a Ford
A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim
Respondez!
To a Locomotive in Winter
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
I Never Lost As Much But Twice (J. 49)
Wild Nights-Wild Nights! (J. 249)
There’s a Certain Slant of Light (J. 258)
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes (J. 341)
This Is My Letter to the World (J. 441)
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died (J. 465)
The Brain—Is Wider than the Sky (J. 632)
Because I Could Not Stop for Death (J. 712)
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (J. 986)
In Winter in My Room (J. 1670)
My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (J. 1732)
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
A Long Tale
- Jabberwocky
- Humpty Dumpty’s Explication
The Walrus and the Carpenter
The White Knight’s Song
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Hap
Neutral Tones
Drummer Hodge
The Subalterns
The Darkling Thrush
Channel Firing
The Convergence of the Twain
I Found Her Out There
The Voice
Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony
The Oxen
In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"
The Harbour Bridge
He Never Expected Much
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
Heaven-Haven
The Habit of Perfection
God’s Grandeur
The Windhover
Pied Beauty
Binsey Poplars
Felix Randal
Spring and Fall
[Carrion Comfort]
[No Worst, There Is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief]
[I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day]
[Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord, If I Contend]
A.E. Houseman (1859–1936)
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
To an Athlete Dying Young
Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux
Eight O’Clock
Hell Gate
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
The Song of the Happy Shepherd
Down by the Salley Gardens
To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
When You Are Old
Who Goes with Fergus?
The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland
Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace
The Cap and Bells
Adam’s Curse
No Second Troy
On Hearing that the Students of Our New University Have Joined the Agitation Against Immoral Literature
Friends
September 1913
The Magi
A Coat
The Wild Swans at Coole
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
A Prayer for My Daughter
Leda and the Swan
Sailing to Byzantium
Among School Children
Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931
Byzantium
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
Lapis Lazuli
Long-Legged Fly
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
Under Ben Bulben
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1930)
Danny Deever
The Widow at Windsor
Shillin’ a Day
The Derelict
Recessional
The Prodigal Son
A Song to Mithras
The Runes on Weland’s Sword
The Way through the Woods
The Nurses
The Storm Cone
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950)
Elsa Wertman
Hamilton Greene
Anne Rutledge
Lucinda Matlock
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
Luke Havergal
Supremacy
Miniver Cheevy
For a Dead Lady
Eros Turannos
The Dark Hills
Mr. Flood’s Party
The Sheaves
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Mending Wall
After Apple-Picking
The Road Not’s Winter Night
The Oven Bird
Birches
Range-Finding
The Witch of Coauos
Fire and Ice
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
To Earthward
Acquainted with the Night
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Desert Places
Neither Out Far nor In Deep
Design
Provide, Provide
The Bearer of Evil Tidings
Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same
The Subverted Flower
The Gift Outright
Directive
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
Chicago
Grass
Cool Tombs
Gargoyle
Edward Thomas(1878–1917)
The Owl
October
The Green Roads
The Gallows
February Afternoon
The Gypsy
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
Sunday Morning
Peter Quince at the Clavierbr
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Anecdote of the Jarbr
The Snow Manbr
Bantams in Pine-Woodsbr
The Emperor of Ice-Creambr
The Idea of Order at Key West
Farewell to Florida
The Man with the Blue Guitar
- I ("The man bent over his guitar")
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
The Man on the Dump
The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man
Of Modern Poetry
A Quiet Normal Life
To an Old Philosopher in Rom
The Plain Sense of Things
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
Tract
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
The Great Figure
Spring and All
The Red Wheelbarrow
Portrait of a Lady
This Is Just to Say
The Yachts
The Young Housewife
Raleigh Was Right
The Dance
Burning the Christmas Greens
- Paterson
Book I. The Delineaments of the Giants
- I ("Paterson lies in the valley .|.|.")
- II ("They begin!")
- III ("Thought clambers up")
Book II. Sunday in the Park
- I ("Outside")
The Ivy Crown
Pictures from Breugel
- II. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
- VI. Haymaking
D.H Lawrence (1885–1930)
The Wild Common
Love on the Farm
The Bride
Gloire de Dijon
Piano
Snake
When I Read Shakespeare
Middle of the World
Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette
Whales Weep Not!
Bavarian Gentians
The Ship of Death
Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
Portrait d’une Femme
The Return
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
A Pact
In a Station of the Metro
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts
- The cantos
- I ("And then went down to the ship";)
- LXXXI ("Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom")
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)
Sea Rose
Oread
Helen
Fragment Sixty-Eight
Tribute to the Angels
- 36-41 ("Ah (you say), this is Holy Wisdom")
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)
"Blighters"
The General
Everyone Sang
On Passing the New Menin Gate
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
Shine, Perishing Republic
Fawn’s Foster-Mother
Hurt Hawks
New Mexican Mountain
Ave Caesar
The Purse-Seine
Shiva
The Deer Lay Down Their Bones
Vulture
Edwin Muir (1887–1959)
Ballad of Hector in Hades
One Foot in Eden
The Horses
Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
The Fish
Poetry
A Grave
The Pangolin
What Are Years?
John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
Here Lies a Lady
Captain Carpenter
Piazza Piece
Dead Boy
The Equilibrists
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Whispers of Immortality
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Gerontion
The Waste Land
Landscapes
- I. New Hampshire
- V. Cape Ann
Little Gidding
Claude McKay (1890–1948)
The Tropics in New York
If We Must Die
America
The Harlem Dancer
Isaac Rosenburg (1890–1918
The Mirror
Break of Day in the Trenche
Louse Hunting
Returning, We Hear the Larks
Dead Man’s Dump
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
First Fig
Recuerdo
[Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink]
[Oh, Sleep Forever in the Latmian Cave]
To a Calvinist in Bali
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Dulce et Decorum Est
Strange Meeting
Greater Love
Disabled
E. E. Cummings (1894–1962)
[All in green went my love riding]
[O sweet spontaneous]
[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]
[a man who had fallen among thieves]
[i sing of Olaf glad and big]
[the way to hump a cow is not]
[my father moved through dooms of love]
[plato told]
[maggie and milly and molly and may]
[now comes the good rain farmers pray for (and)
[out of midsummer’s blazing most not night]
Robert Graves (1895–1985)
The Cool Web
Ogres and Pygmies
Ulysses
Down, Wanton, Down!
The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers
To Juan at the Winter Solstice
The Persian Version
The Blue-Fly
Louise Bogan (1897–1970)
Medusa
Women
The Dream
The Meeting
Hart Crane (1899–1933)
Chaplinesque
At Melville’s Tomb
Voyages
- the bridge
Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge
Royal Palm
The Broken Tower
Allen Tate (1899–1979)
Ode to the Confederate Dead
To the Lacedemonians
The Swimmers
Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
John Sutter
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight
Time and the Garden
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Weary Blues
Brass Spittoons
Morning After
Madam’s Past History
Theme for English B
Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
Not Waving But Drowning
Was He Married?
Admire Cranmer!
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
To Carry the Child
Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
Yet Do I Marvel
Incident
Heritage
Patrick Kavanagh(1904–1967)
Tinker’s Wife
Inniskeen Road: July Evening
Canal Bank Walk
Come Dance with Kitty Stobling
In Memory of My Mother
Earl Birney (b. 1904)
The Bear on the Delhi Road
The Gray Woods Exploding
Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)
Mexico Is a Foreign Country: Four Studies in Naturalism
- IV. The Mango on the Mango Tree
Riddle in the Garden
Flaubert in Egypt
There’s a Grandfather’s Clock in the Hall
Stanley Kunitz (b. 1905)
River Road
The Wellfleet Whale
John Betjeman (1906-1984)
The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
An Incident in the Early Life of Ebenezer Jones, Poet, 1828
A Subaltern’s Love-Song
The Cottage Hospital
False Security
William Empson (1906–1984)
Villanelle
Legal Fiction
Ignorance of Death
Missing Dates
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
The Letter
- V. ("O where are you going?")
The Wanderer
Adolescence
Our Hunting Fathers
As I Walked Out One Evening
Lullaby
Mus;aaee des Beaux Arts
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
Mundus et Infans
In Praise of Limestone
Their Lonely Betters
The Shield of Achilles
A Lullaby
A. D. Hope (b. 1907)
Australia
Observation Car
The Lingam and the Yoni
O Imperial Adam
Advice to Young Ladies
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)
Snow
Bagpipe Music
Brother Fire
The Libertine
Variation on Heraclitus
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Cuttings
Cuttings (later)
My Papa’s Waltz
Dolor
The Waking
Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze
I Knew a Woman
Wish for a Young Wife
The Far Field
In a Dark Time
A. M. Klein (1909–1972)
Portrait of the Poet as Landscape
Charles Olson (1910–1970)
The maximus poems
I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You
Maximus, to Gloucester
- Letter 2
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
The Man-Moth
The Fish
Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
The Armadillo
In the Waiting Room
Poem ("About the size of an old-style dollar bill")
One Art
Josephine Miles (1911–1985)
Preliminary to Classroom Lecture
Belief
Reason
[The Entrepreneur Chicken Shed His Tail Feathers, Surplus]
Fields of Learning
Irving Layton (b. 1912)
The Birth of Tragedy
A Tall Man Executes a Jig
William Everson (b. 1912)
Year’s End
The Poet Is Dead
Tendril in the Mesh
- IV. ("Daughter of earth and child of the wave")
Runoff
Robert Hayden (1913–1980)
The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
Those Winter Sundays
"|’Mystery Boy’ Looks for Kin in Nashville"
A Plague of Starlings
A Letter from Phillis Wheatley
Bone-Flower Elegy
Dudley Randall (b. 1914)
Ballad of Birmingham
Booker T. and W. E. B.
A Poet Is Not a Jukebox
William Stafford (b. 1914)
Traveling through the Dark
At the Bomb Testing Site
Monuments for a Friendly Girl at a Tenth Grade Party
Report to Crazy Horse
After Arguing against the Contention That Art Must Come from Discontent
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Eighth Air Force
A Girl in a Library
Next Day
John Berryman (1914-1972)
A Professor’s Song
- The dream songs
14 ("Life, friends is boring. We must not say so")
16 ("Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls")
75 ("Turning it over, considering, like a madman")
76 Henry’s Confession
149 ("This world is gradually becoming a place")
312 ("I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you'")
Sonnet 25
Of Suicide
Henry’s Understanding
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953
The Hand That Signed the Paper
The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
The Hunchback in the Park
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Fern Hill
In My Craft or Sullen Art
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Judith Writh (b. 1915)
Bora Ring
Flood Year
"Dove-Love"
The Beanstalk, Meditated Later
Australia 1970
P. K. Page (b. 1916)
The Stenographers
Images of Angels
Photos of a Saltmine
Kaleidoscope
Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
Memories of West Street and Lepke
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
Skunk Hour
For the Union Dead
Ezra Pound
Robert Frost
After the Convention
Dolphin
Epilogue
Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
A Song in the Front Yard
Sadie and Maud
The Lovers of the Poor
Boy Breaking Glass
The Blackstone Rangers
Young Africans
The Boy Died in My Alley
Al Purdy (b. 1918)
Winter Walking
The Madwoman on the Train
Lament for the Dorsets
Spinning
Robert Duncan (1919–1988)
Poetry, a Natural Thing
Passage over Water
Childhood’s Retreat
A Little Language
William Meredith (b. 1919)
On Falling Asleep by Firelight
Bachelor
Crossing Over
Dying Away
Keith Douglas (1920–1944)
Aristocrats
Vergissmeinnicht
Soissons
Simplify Me When I’m Dead
Amy Clampitt (b. 1920)
Beach Glass
Gooseberry Fool
A Cure at Porlock
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
The Pardon
Grasse: The Olive Trees
The Death of a Toad
Ceremony
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Pangloss’s Song
Playboy
The Writer
Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
Church Going
The Whitsun Weddings
MCMXIV
Sunny Prestatyn
High Windows
This Be the Verse
Sad Steps
The Explosion
Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
"More Light! More Light!"
Sestina d’Inverno
The Deodand
An Old Malediction
James Dickey (b. 1923)
The Hospital Window
Buckdancer’s Choice
Falling
Richard Hugo (1923–1982)
The Way a Ghost Dissolves
The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field
Salt Water Story
Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)
Seeing the Bones
Spree
Video Cuisine
A. R. Ammons (b. 1926)
Corsons Inlet
Small Song
The City Limits
Easter Morning
Singling & Doubling Together
Motion's Holdings
James Merrill (b. 1926)
The Broken Home
The Victor Dog
- The changing light at sandover
The Book of Ephraim
- B
Mirabell's Books of Number
- 8.1 ("It starts in the small hours. An interlude")
- 8.2 ("7 more to go. did those first visitors to the sickroom")
Coda: The Higher Keys
- The Ballroom at Sandover
The Pier: Under Pisces
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
A Wicker Basket
The Window
"I Keep to Myself Such Measures . . ."
Self-Portrait
The Faces
Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926–1997)
Howl
- I ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .")
A Supermarket in California
America
To Aunt Rose
Mugging
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
Poem ("The eager note on my door said ’Call me’ ")
The Day Lady Died
Why I Am Not a Painter
Robert Bly (b. 1926)
Johnson’s Cabinet Watched by Ants
Evolution from the Fish
My Father’s Wedding
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock
The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students
The Seekonk Woods
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
The Instruction Manual
The Tennis Court Oath
Knocking Around
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
Hard Times
W. S. Merwin (b. 1927)
Leviathan
The Drunk in the Furnace
Home for Thanksgiving
Footprints on the Glacier
The Burnt Child
James Wright (1927-1980)
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
The Minneapolis Poem
In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned
A Secret Gratitude
The Journey
Philip Levine (b. 1928)
To a Child Trapped in a Barbershop
They Feed They Lion
The Life Ahead
Genius
Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
The Truth the Dead Know
All My Pretty Ones
The Starry Night
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
Orion
Diving into the Wreck
Twenty-One Love Poems
- II ("I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.")
- XI ("Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes")
- (The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)
- XX ("That conversation we were always on the edge")
- XXI ("The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones")
Yom Kippur 1984
Thom Gunn (b. 1929)
The Byrnies
My Sad Captains
Moly
Autobiography
Donahue’s Sister
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
A Far Cry from Africa
Codicil
Frederiksted, Dusk
Port of Spain
The Fortunate Traveller
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Riprap
Four Poems for Robin
Axe Handles
Getting in the Wood
Geese Gone Beyond
The Grand Entry
Old Woman Nature
Ted Hughes (b. 1930)
The Thought-Fox
An Otter
Wodwo
Crow’s First Lesson
Roe Deer
Orf
Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932)
In Memory of Jane Fraser
Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings
September Song
Funeral Music
- 6 ("My little son, when you could command mar___vels")
- 8 ("Not as we are but as we must appear")
The Imaginative Life
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
- 1. Quaint Mazes
- 9. The Laurel Axe
- 11. Idylls of the King
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
Lady Lazarus
Ariel
Daddy
Blackberrying
Audre Lorde (b. 1934)
Coal
Love Poem
The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors
Power
Beams
Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934)
Political Poem
Legacy
Babylon Revisited
A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie
Jon Stallworthy (b. 1935)
A poem about Poems About Vietnam
A Letter from Berlin
The Almond Tree
June Jordan (b. 1936)
Onesided Dialog
You Came with Shells
Second Poem from Nicaragua Libre: War Zone
July 4, 1984: For Buck
DeLiza Spend the Day in the City
Tony Harrison (b. 1937)
The school of eloquence
Heredity
On Not Being Milton
Me Tarzan
Book Ends
Turns
Marked with D
Self Justification
Lines to My Grandfathers
Diane Wakoski (b. 1937)
Belly Dancer
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
A Valentine for Ben Franklin Who Drives a Truck in California
Michael Harper (b. 1938)
American History
Debridement
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
Requiem for the Croppies
Bogland
Punishment
The Strand at Lough Beg
The Otter
The Harvest Bow
Station Island
- XII ("Like a convalescent, I took the hand")
Alphabets
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
This Is a Photograph of Me
The Animals in that Country
Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age
Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture
Variations on the Word [cf2]Love[cf1]
Spelling
Robert Pinsky(b. 1940)
Doctor Frolic
The Figured Wheel
The Living
The Questions
Marilyn Hacket (b. 1942)
Canzone
Runaways Caf;aae II
Mythology
Coda
- ("Did you love well what very soon you left?")
Dave Smith (b. 1942)
Hole, Where Once in Passion We Swam
The Roundhouse Voices
Snapshot of a Crab-Picker Among Barrels Spilling Over, Apparently at the End of Her Shift
Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943)
Elizabeth
Letters & Other Worlds
Burning Hills
(Inner Tube)
James Tate (b. 1943)
The Blue Booby
The Wheelchair Butterfl
The Lost Pilot
Poem to Some of My Recent Poems
A Wedding
Craig Raine (b. 1944)
Nature Study
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
An Attempt at Jealousy
Norman Dubie (b. 1945)
The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals
Elizabeth’s War with the Christmas Bear
Elegy for Wright & Hugo
Lamentations
Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)
[It Was a Long Time Before]
In Cold Storm Light
Toe’osh: A Laguna Coyote Story
Michael Blumenthal (b. 1949)
Inventors
Abandoning Your Car in a Snowstorm: Rosslyn, Virginia
Back from the Word-Processing Course, I Say to My Old Typewriter
James Fenton (b. 1949)
A German Requiem
Dead Soldiers
God, A Poem
Paul Muldoon (b. 1951)
The Big House
The Weepies
Making the Move
The Right Arm
Brock
Gary Soto (b. 1952)
The Elements of San Joaquin
- Wind [2]
- Rain
The Map
The Tale of Sunlight
Making Money: Drought Year in Minkler, California
Oranges
Rita Dove (b. 1952)
The House Slav
Banneker
Parsley
The Event
Weathering Out
The Great Palaces of Versailles
Alberto Rios (b. 1952)
Madre Sofia
A Dream of Husbands
A Man Then Suddenly Stops Moving
Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
Francine’s Room
That Pull from the Left
Windigo
Cathy Song (b. 1955)
Leaving
Beauty and Sadness
Lost Sister
Heaven
Modern Poetry in English: A Brief History

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Modern Poems - An Introduction to Poetry

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