Synopsis
Collects over five hundred poems in chronological order from the eighth century to the present, including multiple works by major poets.
Review
Introduction: On Poetry 1. A Brief History Anonymous (eighth century). The Seafarer (modern version by Ezra Pound, 1912) Anonymous (eighth century). From Beowulf* (translation by C.W. Kennedy) Anonymous--Middle English Lyrics (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). Summer Is Icumen In. Alysoun. All Night by the Rose. Western Wind. The Lady Fortune Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400). From The Legend of Good Women* Anonymous--the Popular Ballads (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Get Up and Bar the Door. Lord Randal. The Three Ravens. The Cherry-Tree Carol. The Unquiet Grave. Bonny Barbara Allan Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) They Flee from Me Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd Edmund Spenser. (1552?-1599). From Amoretti: Sonnet 15 (Ye tradefull Merchants, that with weary toyle), Sonnet 67 (Lyke as a huntsman, after weary chace), Sonnet 75 (One day I wrote her name upon the strand), Sonnet 82 (Joy of my life, full oft of loving you) Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). Thou Blind Man's Mark. Leave Me, O Love Chidiock Tichborne (1558?-1586). Tichborne's Elegy Robert Southwell (1561?-1595). The Burning Babe Michael Drayton (1563-1631). From Idea:* Sonnet 6 (How many paltry, foolish, painted things), Sonnet 7 (Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part) Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). The Passionate Shepherd to His Love William Shakespeare (1564-1616). From The Sonnets: Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?). Sonnet 20 (A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted), Sonnet 29 (When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,), Sonnet 30, (When to the sessions of sweet silent thought), Sonnet 73 (That time of year thou mayst in me behold), Sonnet 97 (How like a winter hath my absence been), Sonnet 104 (To me, fair friend, you never can be old), Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds), Sonnet 129 (Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame), Sonnet 130 (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;), Sonnet 144 (Two loves I have, of comfort and despair), Sonnet 151 (Love is too young to know what conscience is,--) Anonymous--Elizabethan Lyrics (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Back and Side Go Bare. April Is in My Mistress' Face. My Love in Her Attire. There Is a Lady Sweet and Kind. The Silver Swan Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). Adieu, Farewell Earth's Bliss Thomas Campion 91567-1620). My Sweetest Lesbia. There Is a Garden in Her Face 2. A Brief History John Donne (1572-1631). Song (Go and catch a falling star,). The Sun Rising. A Valediction: Of Weeping. A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning. The Funeral. From Holy Sonnets:* Sonnet 7 (At the round earth's imagined corners, blow), Sonnet 10 (Death, be not proud, though some have called thee), Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you). Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Delight in Disorder. Upon Julia's Clothes. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time George Herbert (1593-1633). The Pulley. The Collar. Easter Wings. Virtue. Love (III) John Milton (1608-1674). How Soon Hath Time. On His Blindness. At a Solemn Music. On the Late Massacre in Piedmont. From Paradise Lost, Book 12* Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672). To My Dear and Loving Husband. A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Publick Employment Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). To His Coy Mistress. The Garden John Dryden (1631-1700). From The Aeneid:* The Death of Dido Edward Taylor (1642-1729). Meditation Six. Upon a Spider Catching a Fly Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). A Description of the Morning. A Description of a City Shower Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Ode on Solitude. From An Essay on Man. From the Iliad, Book 18.* From The Rape of the Lock 3. A Brief History Thomas Gray (1716-1771). Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Christopher Smart (1722-1771) From Rejoice in the Lamb* William Blake (1757-1827). From Songs of Innocence:* Introduction, The Lamb, The Chimney-Sweeper, The Little Black Boy. From Songs of Experience:* The Sic Rose, The Tyger, London, To the Muses. From Milton* (And did those feet in ancient time) Robert Burns (1759-1796). To a Mouse. John Anderson, My Jo. A Red, Red Rose William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Lines, Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways. A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. It Is a Beauteous Evening. London, 1802. Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802. Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. She Was a Phantom of Delight. The World Is Too Much with Us. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Scorn Not the Sonnet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Kubla Kahn. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Dejection: An Ode George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-18224). So We'll Go No More A-Roving. She Walks in Beauty. The Destruction of Sennacherib Lydia Sigourney (1792-1865). The Mother of Washington. Death of an Infant. Female Education Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Ozymandias. Ode to the West Wind. To-- (Music, when soft voices die,) John Keats (1795-1821). On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. When I Have Fears. Ode on a Grecian Urn. La Belle Dame sans Merci. To Autumn 4. A Brief History Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Concord Hymn. Days Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B.R. Haydon. Grief. Sonnets from the Portuguese:* Sonnet 14 (If thou must love me, let it be for nought), Sonnet 43 (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The Jewish Cemetery at Newport. Chaucer. The Cross of Snow Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). To Helen. The Raven. Annabel Lee Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Song (A spirit hounts the year's last hours). Ulysses. From The Lotos-Eaters:* Choric Song; Break, Break, Break; The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls. From In Memoriam A.H.H.:* 1 (I held it truth, with him who sings), 7 (Dark house, by which once more I stand), 11 (Calm is the morn without a sound), 50 (Be near me when my light is low), 130 (Thy voice is on the rolling air;). The Eagle. Crossing the Bar. The Lady of Shalott Robert Browning (1812-1889). My Last Duchess. Home-Thoughts, from Abroad. Meeting at Night. Parting at Morning Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Song of Myself. When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. A Noiseless Patient Spider Alice Carey (1820-1871). The Bridal Veil. The West Country Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). Shakespeare. Dover Beach Emily Dickinson (1820-1886). Success is counted sweetest (#67). I taste a lLiquor never brewed (#214). I like a look of Agony (#241). Wild Nights--Wild Nights! (#249) I can wade Grief (#252). There's a certain Slant of Light (#258). I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (#280). I'm Nobody! Who are you? (#288) The Soul selects her own Society (#303). A Bird came down the Walk (#328). After great pain, a formal feeling comes (#341). Much Madness is divinest Sense (#435). This is my letter to the World (#441). I heard a Fly buzz--when I died (#465). Pain--has an Element of Blank (#650). Because I could not stop for Death (#712). My Life has stood--a Loaded Gun (#754). The poets light but Lamps (#883). A narrow Fellow in the Grass (#986). I never saw a Moor (#1052). The Bustle in a House (#1078). Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (#1129). A Route of Evanescence (#1463). My life closed twice before its close (#1732). To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee (#1755) Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) Her Eyes. Found Frozen. Danger Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Jabberwocky Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The Ruined Maid. Neutral Tones. The Man He Killed. The Convergence of the Twain. Channel Firing Ina Coolbrith (1841-1928). Withheld. I Cannot Count My Life a Loss Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Heaven--Haven. Pied Beauty. Spring and Fall. (Carrion Comfort). No Worst, There Is None A.E. Housman (1859-1936). From A Shropshire Lad:* Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now; When I Was One-and-Twenty; To an Athlete Dying Young; From Far, from Eve and Morning; With Rue My Heart Is Laden; Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff... Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Gunga Din. If 5. A Brief History William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The Lake Isle of Innisfree. When You Are Old. The Folly of Being Comforted. Easter 1916. The Wild Swans at Coole. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. The Second Coming. Leda and the Swan. Sailing to Byzantium. Among School Children. After Long Silence. Lapis Lazuli. Politics. Adam's Curse. From Oedipus at Colonus.* Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop Ernest Dowson (1867-1900). Non sum qualis eram bonea sub regno Cynarae Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935). Miniver Cheevy. For a Dead Lady. Eros Turannos. Mr. Flood's Party. Karma. New England Walter de la Mare (1873-1956). The Listeners Robert Frost (1874-1963). Mending Wall. The Road Not Taken. Birches. Fire and Ice. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Once by the Pacific. Departmental. Design. The Draft Horse. In Winter in the Woods Alone Robert Service (1874-1958). The Cremation of Sam McGee Gertrude Stein (1874-1945). A Petticoat. A Waist. A Time to Eat. From Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded:* 29 (I love my love with a v) Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Early Copper. Fog. Cool Tombs Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Sunday Morning. Anecdote of the Jar. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The Snow Man. The Emperor of Ice-Cream. The Idea of Order at Key West. Peter Quince at the Clavier. Bantams in Pine-Woods William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). The Young Housewife. The Red Wheelbarrow. The Yachts. The Dance. The Great Figure. This Is Just to Say. Tract. To Elsie D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Piano. Snake Ezra Pound (1885-1972). The Garden. Salutation. In a Station of the Metro. Dance Figure. L'Art 1910. The Tea Shop. Ancient Music. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter. These Fought in Any Case. From The Cantos:* Canto 81. From Hugh Selwyn Mauberly* H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961). Heat. Sea Rose. Oread Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Divinely Suerfluous Beauty. Love the Wold Swan. Cassandra Marianne Moore (1887-1972). Poetry. A Grave. The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing Edwin Muir (1887-1959). Childhood. The Animals. The Brothers T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Waste Land. Sweeney Among the Nightingales. Journey of the Magi 6. A Brief History John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974). Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter. Old Mansion. Piazza Piece. Spectral Lovers Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982). Ars Poetica. You, Andrew Marvell Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). First Fig. Sonnet 2 (Time does not bring relief; you all have lied). Sonnet 11 (I shall forget you presently, my dear,). Sonnet 15 (Only until this cigarette is ended.). Sonnet 27 (I know I am but sumer to your heart,). Sonnet 42 (What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,). Sonnet 95 (Women have loved before as I love now;). Sonnet 99 (Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink). Sonnet 115 (Even in the moment of our earliest kiss). Sonnet 116 (Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;). Sonnet 120 (If in the years to come you should recall,) Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Strange Meeting. Dulce et Decorum Est. Anthem for Doomed Youth Dorothy Parker (1893-1967). Resume. Unfortunate Coincidence. Indian Summer. One Perfect Rose E. E. Cummings (1894-1963). the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls. may i feel said he. All in green my love riding. in Just-. Buffalo Bill's. my sweet old etcetera. i sing of Olaf glad and big. I* Louise Bogan (1897-1970). The Crossed Apple. Medusa Hart Crane (1899-1932). Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge. Chaplinesque Janet Lewis (1899- ). Girl Help Allen Tate (1899-1979). Ode to the Confederate Dead Yvor Winters (1900-1968). At the San Francisco Airport Langston Hughes (1902-1967). The Negro Speaks of Rivers. I, Too. Old Walt. Harlem Stevie Smith (1902-1972). Not Waving but Drowning Countee Cullen (1903-1946). For a Lady I Know. Heritage Earl Birney (1904-1995). Anglosaxon Street. The Bear on the Delhi Road Richard Eberhart (1904- ). The Fury of Aerial Bombardment. On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, New England. The Groundhog Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). Vitamins and Roughage. Proust's Madeleine W.H. Auden (1907-1973). The Unknown Citizen. Musee des Beaux Arts. In Memory of W.B. Yeats. Epitaph on a Tyrant. As I Walked Out One Evening. Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love. Stop All the Clocks Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). Root Cellar. The Waking. Dolor. I Knew a Woman. In a Dark Time. My Papa's Waltz. The Meadow Mouse A.M. Klein (1909-1972). The Rocking Chair. Lone Bather Stephen Spender (1909-1995). I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great Charles Olson (1910-1970). I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The Fish. Sandpiper. In the Waiting Room. The Moose. One Art. Sonnet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). The Character of Love Seen as a Search for the Lost. Do the Dead Know What Time It Is? Irving Layton (1912- ). Party at Hydra. Berry Picking Robert Hayden (1913-1980). Those Winter Sundays. Frederick Douglass John Berryman (1914-1972) A Professor's Song. Dream Song #14 David Ignatow (1914- ). Sunday at the State Hospital. Moonlight Poem. No Theory. The Bagel Randall Jarrell (1914-1965). The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. Nestus Gurley Dudley Randall (1914- ). Ballad of Birmingham William Stafford (1914-1993). At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border. Traveling Through the Dark Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. In My Craft or Sullen Art. Fern Hill. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night Isabella Gardner (1915-1981). Timeo. Summers Ago. Knowing P.K. Page (1916- ). The Stenographers. Schizophrenic Gwendolyn Brooks (1917- ). The Bean Eaters. We Real Cool Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Mr. Edwards and the Spider. Skunk Hour. Water. For the Union Dead Margaret Avison (1918- ). A Nameless One Alfred Purdy (1918- ). The Cariboo Horses. Wilderness Gothic Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- ). In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see. The pennycandystore beyond the El Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). The Goose Fish. I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee Richard Wilbur (1921- ). In a Churchyard. Exeunt. Place Pigalle. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World. Year's-End Philip Larkin (1922-1985). Church Going. The Whitsun Weddings James Dickey (1923- ). The Heaven of Animals. Buckdancer's Choice Denise Levertov (1923-1997). Six Variations (part iii). Come into Animal Presence. What Were They Like? Losing Track Maxine Kumin (1925- ). Morning Swim. Woodchucks Edward Field (1924- ) The Bride of Frankenstein Catherine Davis (1924- ). After a Time. What Does It Mean Donald Justice (1925- ). Here in Katmandu. Luxury. Anonymous Drawing. Landscape with Little Figures Robert Bly (1926- ). Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter Robert Creeley (1926- ). Oh No. Naughty Boy Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). From Howl.* A Supermarket in California. Ode to Failure James Merrill (1926-1995). Charles on Fire. Maisie Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). The Day Lady Died. Autobiographia Literaria. A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island John Ashbery (1927- ). City Afternoon. Paradoxes and Oxymorons Galway Kinnell (1927- ). Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock. To Christ Our Lord W.S. Merwin (1927- ). The River of Bees. The Moths James Wright (1927-1980). Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Two Postures Beside a Fire Philip Levine (1928- ). To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop. You Can Have It Donald Peterson (1928- ). The Ballad of Dead Yankees Anne Sexton (1928-1974). Her Kind. Cinderella. In Celebration of My Uterus Thom Gunn (1929- ). Street Song. The Discovery of the Pacific. Black Jackets X.J. Kennedy (1929- ). In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day. Nude Descending a Staircase Maurice Kenny (1929- ). Listening for the Elders. Legacy Adrienne Rich (1929- ). A Clock in the Square. Aunt Jennifer's Tigers. The Insusceptibles. Diving into the Wreck Ted Hughes (1930- ). Hawk Roosting. Pike. T...
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