Recently, I spent a few days searching through the contents of short fiction anthologies to figure out the most frequently anthologized short stories of the recent past. The results were useful, and one commenter on that post suggested that it would be interesting to do the same thing with poetry—I agreed, and set myself the task.
To figure it out, I used the same essential methodology as I did for the short stories: I looked at the tables of contents for 20 anthologies of poetry published between 1992 and 2016 (you can see the full list of anthologies I surveyed at the bottom of the page) and added them all up. My aim was to see what has been included in “general” poetry anthologies for English-speaking readers, so I looked at anthologies that collected international, American, and English-language poems, and I accepted all time periods, but did not allow for any segmentation or specialization otherwise.
I make no claim to having gotten to every anthology that fits those parameters, of course—consider this a representative sample. Even so, the amount of data I wound up processing was enormous. Poetry anthologies have way more entries in them than short story anthologies, and are sometimes thousands of pages long. I knew this already, of course, but now I know it with my whole body, from shriveled eyes to laptop-burned thighs to cramped feet. But in the end, I got there. I counted all the poems.
In the below list, I have only included those poems that appeared three or more times across the 20 anthologies—there were many more that were represented twice, but one has to draw the line somewhere. I should also make clear that—unlike short stories, for the most part—poems, especially old poems, are often given different titles in different editions, and even oftener, certain lines from a longer poem are excerpted, to be notated in the table of contents however the editor of the anthology sees fit. Since I didn’t always have access to the full anthology to check which poem—or which part of which poem—was actually included, some of the data here may be slightly soft. I’ve done my best, and marked places where there was obvious confusion. Now, with no further ado:
The Most Anthologized Poems of the Last 25 Years:
Eleven Inclusions:
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Ten Inclusions:
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
Robert Frost, “Birches”
Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”
Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife : a Letter”
Nine Inclusions:
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death –”
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Langston Hughes, “Harlem”
Marianne Moore, “Poetry” [two versions of this poem exist; where both are included, I’ve counted it once]
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World“
Eight Inclusions:
Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light,”
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”
Robert Frost, “Design”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”
James Wright, “A Blessing”
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Seven Inclusions:
John Berryman, “Dream Song 14”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 29”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”
Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man”
e. e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”
Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
Emily Dickinson, “I heard a fly buzz – when I died –”
Rita Dove, “Parsley”
T. S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi”
Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl [Part 1 or in full]”
Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Philip Levine, “They Feed They Lion”
W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of my Death”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Fig”
Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”
Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”
Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Mr. Flood’s Party”
Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”
Carl Sandburg, “Grass”
William Stafford, “Traveling through the Dark”
Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“
Six Inclusions:
A. R. Ammons, “Corsons Inlet”
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of William Butler Yeats”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 4”
William Blake, “The Tyger”
William Blake, “London”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”
Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel”
e. e. cummings, “next to of course god america i”
Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”
Emily Dickinson, “I like to see it lap the Miles –”
Emily Dickinson, “The Soul selects her own Society”
Emily Dickinson, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”
Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”
T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”
Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”
Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night”
Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
Robert Frost, “Directive”
Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage”
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”
John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me”
Philip Levine, “You Can Have It”
Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”
Marianne Moore, “The Fish”
Sylvia Plath, “Ariel”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea”
Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”
John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”
Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
Adrienne Rich, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”
Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being”
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”
Mark Strand, “The Prediction”
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
Jean Toomer, “Reapers”
Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa”
Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”
James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
William Carlos Williams, “Queen-Anne’s-Lace”
William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
William Carlos Williams, “This is Just to Say”
William Carlos Williams, “The Yachts“
Five Inclusions:
A. R. Ammons, “The City Limits”
John Ashbery, “Soonest Mended”
W.H. Auden, “Lullaby [Lay your sleeping head, my love]”
Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Armadillo”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”
William Blake, “The Lamb”
William Blake, “The Sick Rose”
Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Song in the front yard”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)”
William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis”
William Cullen Bryant, “To a Waterfowl”
Thomas Campion, “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb”
Countee Cullen, “Incident”
e. e. cummings, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”
e. e. cummings, “may I feel said he”
James Dickey, “The Sheep Child”
Emily Dickinson, “Much madness is divinest Sense (435)”
Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (1129)”
Emily Dickinson, “My life closed twice before its close – (1732)”
John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Helen”
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Oread”
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”
Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm”
Louise Erdrich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”
Robert Frost, “The Wood Pile”
Robert Frost, “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”
Robert Frost, “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same”
Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
Robert Frost, “Provide, Provide”
Thomas Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain”
Michael S. Harper, “Dear John, dear Coltrane”
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
Robert Hayden, “Night, Death, Mississippi”
Anthony Hecht, “A Hill”
George Herbert, “The Collar”
Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “[No Worst, There Is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief]”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
A.E. Housman, “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff . . .”
Richard Hugo, “Degrees of gray in Philipsburg”
Robinson Jeffers, “Hurt Hawks”
Donald Justice, “Men at Forty”
John Keats, “To Autumn”
John Keats, “When I Have Fears”
Galway Kinnell, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”
Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Tu Do Street”
Philip Larkin, “Church Going”
D. H. Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians”
Li-young Lee, “Persimmons”
Robert Lowell, “Memories of West Street and Lepke”
Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”
Archibald MacLeish, “The End of the World”
Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”
James Merrill, “Lost in Translation”
John Milton, “Lycidas”
Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them”
Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Michael Palmer, “I Do Not”
Sylvia Plath, “The Colossus”
Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
Ezra Pound, “A Pact”
Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’une Femme”
Ezra Pound, “Canto I (“And then went down to the ship”)”
Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
Theodore Roethke, “Root Cellar”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”)”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the Confederate Dead”
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”
Dylan Thomas, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”
Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Walt Whitman, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
William Wordsworth, “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
William Wordsworth, “Three Years She Grew”
William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
James Wright, “In response to a rumor that the oldest whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia has been condemned”
Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
William Butler Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”
Four Inclusions:
John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
John Ashbery, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”
W.H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen”
W.H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 1 (“Huffy Henry hid the day”)”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 384 (The marker slants)”
William Blake, “From ‘Milton’”
William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”
Louise Bogan, “Medusa”
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”
Anne Bradstreet, “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”
Robert Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer”
Robert Burns, “A Red Red Rose”
Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”
Lord Byron, “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving”
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”
Gregory Corso, “Marriage”
William Cowper, “The Castaway”
Hart Crane, “Voyages”
Countee Cullen, “From the dark tower”
e. e. cummings, “in Just”
e. e. cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s”
Emily Dickinson, “Success is counted sweetest (67)”
Emily Dickinson, “I taste a liquor never brewed (214)”
Emily Dickinson, “A Bird came down the Walk (328)”
Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (288)”
Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility (657)”
John Donne, “The Flea”
John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
John Donne, “Holy Sonnet 10 (“Death, be not proud, though some have called
thee”)”
John Donne, “Holy Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You”)”
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “from Walls do not fall: 1 (“An incident here and there”)”
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Sea rose”
T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Days”
Louise Erdrich, “Dear John Wayne”
John Dryden, “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham”
Robert Frost, “Home Burial”
Robert Frost, “Desert Places”
Robert Frost, “Out, Out—“
Robert Frost, “The Most of It”
Allen Ginsberg, “America”
Louise Glück, “The Drowned Children”
Louise Glück, “Mock Orange”
Louise Glück, “Vespers”
Thomas Gray, “Ode (On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes)”
Thomas Hardy, “Neutral Tones”
Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”
Thomas Hardy, “Afterwards”
Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing”
Thomas Hardy, “In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
Robert Hass, “A Story about the Body”
Anthony Hecht, “The Book of Yolek”
George Herbert, “Jordan (I)”
George Herbert, “Easter Wings”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Old Ironsides”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Chambered Nautilus”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, [“I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day]”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “[Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord…]”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “[Carrion Comfort]”
A.E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now”
A.E. Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young”
A.E. Housman, “On Wenlock Edge the Wood’s in Trouble”
Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”
Ted Hughes, “Pike”
Richard Hugo, “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir”
Randall Jarrell, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”
Randall Jarrell, “Next day”
Randall Jarrell, “90 north”
James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation”
John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Galway Kinnell, “The Bear”
Kenneth Koch, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”
Kenneth Koch, “One Train May Hide Another”
D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death”
D. H. Lawrence, “Snake”
Denise Levertov, “Caedmon”
Denise Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage”
Philip Levine, “Animals are passing from our lives”
Audre Lorde, “Coal”
Robert Lowell, “To speak of woe that is in marriage”
Edwin Markham, “The Man with the Hoe”
Claude McKay, “America”
Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer”
Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York”
Herman Melville, “The Maldive Shark”
James Merrill, “The Broken Home”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Recuerdo”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “[I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed]”
Marianne Moore, “No Swan So Fine”
Marianne Moore, “A Grave”
Paul Muldoon, “Meeting the British”
Sharon Olds, “The Pope’s Penis”
George Oppen, “Psalm”
Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”
Dorothy Parker, “Resume”
Sylvia Plath, “Edge”
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXXI”
Ezra Pound, “Canto XLV (“With Usura”)”
Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
John Crowe Ransom, “Piazza Piece”
Adrienne Rich, “Orion”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “For a Dead Lady”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Luke Havergal”
Theodore Roethke, “The Lost Son”
Theodore Roethke, “Cuttings”
Theodore Roethke, “Elegy for Jane”
Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel”
Carl Sandburg, “Fog”
Anne Sexton, “The Truth the Dead Know”
Anne Sexton, “The Room of My Life”
Petcy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Skylark”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”)”
Edith Sitwell, “Still Falls the Rain”
W. D. Snodgrass, “April Inventory”
Gary Snyder, “Riprap”
Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti [in full or excerpted]”
Gertrude Stein, “Susie Asado”
Wallace Stevens, “Disillusionment of ten o’clock”
Wallace Stevens, “Study of Two Pears”
Wallace Stevens, “Domination of Black”
Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate”
Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”
Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”
Sir John Suckling, “Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Mariana”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
Edward Thomas, “The Owl”
Dylan Thomas, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”
Jean Toomer, “Portrait in Georgia”
Jean Toomer, “November Cotton Flower”
Edmund Waller, “Go, Lovely Rose”
Robert Penn Warren, “Evening Hawk”
Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”
Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Richard Wilbur, “A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciara”
Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet”
William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
William Carlos Williams, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
William Carlos Williams, “Portrait of a Lady”
William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie”
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
William Carlos Williams, “The Dance”
William Carlos Williams, “Danse Russe”
Thomas Wyatt, “They Flee from Me”
William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”
William Butler Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”
William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
William Butler Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole “
William Butler Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”
Louis Zukofsky, from “A”
Three Inclusions:
Ai, “Twenty-Year Marriage”
Agha Shahid Ali, “Lenox Hill”
R. Ammons, “Gravelly Run”
Margaret Atwood, “This Is a Photograph of Me”
W.H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”
W.H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”
Amiri Baraka, “An Agony. As now.”
Charles Bernstein, “Of Time and the Line”
Charles Bernstein, “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 76 (Henry’s Confession)”
John Berryman, “Dream Song 382 (“At Henry’s bier let some thing fall out well:”)”
John Berryman, “Henry’s understanding”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Brazil, January 1, 1502″
Elizabeth Bishop, “Filling Station”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
William Blake, “Song (“How sweet I roam’d from field to field”)”
William Blake, “The Little Black Boy”
William Blake, “Holy Thursday”
William Blake, “Ah Sun-flower”
Robert Bly, “Johnson’s Cabinet Watched by Ants”
Louise Bogan, “Women”
Anne Bradstreet, “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666″
Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue”
Emily Brontë, “Remembrance”
Emily Brontë, “[“No coward soul is mine”]”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Mother”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean eaters”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone rangers”
Sterling Brown, “Slim in Atlanta”
Sterling Brown, “Bitter Fruit of the Tree”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “ A Musical Instrument”
Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi”
Robert Browning, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”
Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover”
Robert Burns, “The Banks o’ Doon”
Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
Lord Byron, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year”
Thomas Campion, “My Sweetest Lesbia”
Marilyn Chin, “How I Got That Name”
Amy Clampitt, “Beach Glass”
Lucille Clifton, “Poem to My Uterus”
Lucille Clifton, “to my last period”
Lucille Clifton, “At the cemetery, Walnut grove plantation, South Carolina, 1989″
Arthur Hugh Clough, “The Latest Decalogue”
Arthur Hugh Clough, “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”
Billy Collins, “Litany”
Billy Collins, “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey”
William Collins, “Ode to Evening”
Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque”
Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”
Hart Crane, “Repose of Rivers”
Hart Crane, “The River”
Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”
Robert Creeley, “The Flower”
Robert Creeley, “After Lorca”
Robert Creeley, “The Language”
Robert Creeley, “For Love”
Countee Cullen, “To John Keats, poet, at spring time”
e. e. cummings, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”
e. e. cummings, “i sing of Olaf glad and big”
James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals”
James Dickey, “The Hospital Window”
Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope” is the thing with feathers (254)”
Emily Dickinson, “‘I never lost as much but twice -” 39 (49)”
Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights – Wild Nights! (249)”
Emily Dickinson, “I died for Beauty – but was scarce (449)”
Emily Dickinson, “They shut me up in Prose – (613)”
John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day”
John Donne, “The Ecstasy”
John Donne, “The Sun Rising”
John Donne, “A Hymn to God the Father”
John Donne, “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
John Donne, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), “Garden”
Rita Dove, “After reading Mickey in the night kitchen for the third time before bed”
Ernest Dowson, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae”
John Dryden, “Mac Flecknoe”
Carol Ann Duffy, “Little Red-Cap”
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy”
Robert Duncan, “My Mother Would Be a Falconress”
Richard Eberhart, “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”
T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Rhodora”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing”
James Fenton, “A German Requiem”
Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel”
Philip Freneau, “The Indian Burying Ground”
Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”
Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
Robert Frost, “The Silken Tent”
Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”
Allen Ginsberg, “To Aunt Rose”
Louise Glück, “Celestial Music”
Louise Glück, “Vita Nova”
Angelina Weld Grimké, “Fragment”
Donald Hall, “Prophecy”
Thomas Hardy, “Hap”
Thomas Hardy, “Drummer Hodge”
Thomas Hardy, “The Voice”
Michael S. Harper, “Nightmare begins responsibility”
Michael S. Harper , “We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper”
Michael S. Harper, “Reuben, Reuben”
Robert Hass, “Forty Something”
Robert Hayden, “Mourning poem for the queen of Sunday”
Seamus Heaney, “Digging”
Seamus Heaney, “Clearances”
Anthony Hecht, “More light! More light!”
George Herbert, “The Pulley”
Robert Herrick, “Corinna’s Going A-Maying”
John Hollander, “An Old-Fashioned Song”
John Hollander, “Swan and Shadow”
John Hollander, “Adam’s Task”
A.D. Hope, “Australia”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Felix Randal”
A.E. Housman, “With Rue My Heart Is Laden”
A.E. Housman, “Is My Team Ploughing”
Langston Hughes,”Dream Boogie”
Randall Jarrell, “Eighth Air Force”
Robinson Jeffers, “Boats in Fog”
Robinson Jeffers, “The Purse-Seine”
James Weldon Johnson, “O Black and Unknown Bards”
Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”
Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”
Donald Justice, “The Tourist from Syracuse”
Donald Justice, “Variations on a Text by Vallejo”
John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”
John Keats, “Bright Star”
Weldon Kees, “Robinson”
Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow”
Rudyard Kipling, “The Way Through the Woods”
Kenneth Koch, “Permanently”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Nude interrogation”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Thanks”
Stanley Kunitz, “The Portrait”
Walter Savage Landor, “Dirce”
Walter Savage Landor, “Rose Aylmer”
Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”
Philip Larkin, “Aubade”
Philip Larkin, “Talking in Bed”
D. H. Lawrence, “Piano”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”
Li-young Lee, “The Gift”
Li-young Lee, “Eating Together”
Philip Levine, “The Simple truth”
Philip Levine, “Bell Isle, 1949″
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Snow-Flakes”
Audre Lorde, “Hanging Fire”
Audre Lorde, “From the House of Yemanja”
Amy Lowell, “Patterns”
Amy Lowell, “The Weather-Cock Points South”
Robert Lowell, “Waking Early Sunday Morning”
Robert Lowell, “Dolphin”
Robert Lowell, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”
Mina Loy, “Songs to Joannes [or excerpts]”
Archibald MacLeish, “You, Andrew Marvell”
Louis MacNeice, “Bagpipe Music”
Andrew Marvell, “The Mower to the Glowworms”
Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode”
Andrew Marvell, “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”
Edgar Lee Masters, “The Hill”
Edgar Lee Masters, “Petit, the Poet”
Edgar Lee Masters, “Anne Rutledge”
Heather McHugh, “What he thought”
Claude McKay, “The White City”
Claude McKay, “The Lynching”
Herman Melville, “The Portent”
George Meredith, “Lucifer in Starlight”
James Merrill, “The Victor Dog”
James Merrill, “Days of 1964″
James Merrill, “b o d y”
W.S. Merwin, “The Asians Dying”
W.S. Merwin, “For a Coming Extinction”
W.S. Merwin, “The Drunk in the Furnace”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Sonnet: Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink”
John Milton, “L’Allegro”
John Milton, “Il Penseroso”
John Milton, “How Soon Hath Time”
John Milton, “On Shakespeare”
John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”
Marianne Moore, “The Steeple-Jack”
Marianne Moore, “What Are Years?”
Marianne Moore, “To a Steam Roller”
Marianne Moore, “Marriage”
Marianne Moore, “Critics and Connoisseurs”
Thomas Nashe, “Adieu, Farewell, Earth’s Bliss”
Lorine Neidecker, “Poet’s Work”
Howard Nemerov, “Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry”
Frank O’Hara, “Poem (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”)”
Frank O’Hara, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”
Wilfred Owen, “Futility”
Michael Palmer, “Sun”
Dorothy Parker, “Unfortunate Coincidence”
Dorothy Parker, “One Perfect Rose”
Robert Pinsky, “Samurai Song ”
Robert Pinsky, “Shirt”
Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”
Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song”
Sylvia Plath, “Elm”
Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103″
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Haunted Palace”
Ezra Pound, “The Garden”
Ezra Pound, “The Return”
Ezra Pound, “Canto CXVI (Came Neptunus)”
John Crowe Ransom, “Blue Girls”
Adrienne Rich, “Power”
Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The Mill”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Reuben Bright”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The House on the Hill”
Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”
Isaac Rosenberg, “Dead Man’s Dump”
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
Muriel Rukeyser, “The Poem as mask”
Carl Sandburg, “Cool Tombs”
Anne Sexton, “Wanting to die”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”)”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”)”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 146 (“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth”)”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”)”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “England in 1819″
Charles Simic, “Cameo Appearance”
Charles Simic, “Fork”
Charles Simic, “Classic ballroom dances”
Charles Simic, “Country Fair”
Christopher Smart, “from Jubilate Agno (“For I Will Consider my Cat Jeoffry”)”
Stevie Smith, “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock”
W. D. Snodgrass, “Mementos I”
Gary Snyder, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout”
Gary Snyder, “The Bath”
Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles”
Gary Snyder, “Above Pate Valley”
Gary Soto, “Oranges”
Robert Southwell, “The Burning Babe”
Edmund Spenser, “Sonnet 75″
William Stafford, “At the bomb testing site”
Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor”
Wallace Stevens, “The Death of a Soldier”
Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”
Mark Strand, “The Idea”
May Swenson, “Question”
Jonathan Swift, “A Description of the Morning”
Edward Taylor, “Huswifery”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Eagle”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Splendor Falls”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tears, Idle Tears”
Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft or Sullen Art”
Edward Thomas, “Rain”
Henry David Thoreau, “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied”
Jean Toomer, “Georgia Dusk”
Jean Toomer, “Her Lips Are Copper Wire”
Henry Vaughan, “The World”
Henry Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light!”
Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat”
Jones Very, “The Dead”
Derek Walcott, “from The Schooner : Flight (part 11, After the storm : “There’s a fresh light that follows—“)”
Derek Walcott, “Omeros”
Robert Penn Warren, “Bearded Oaks”
Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “Barbara Frietchie”
Walt Whitman, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”
Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”
Richard Wilbur, “The Writer”
Richard Wilbur, “Cottage Street, 1953″
William Carlos Williams, “The Young Housewife”
William Carlos Williams, “The Great Figure”
William Carlos Williams, “Proletarian Portrait”
William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence”
William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper”
Charles Wright, “Clear Night”
Charles Wright, “Homage to Paul Cezanne”
Charles Wright, “Reunion”
Judith Wright, “Request to a Year”
Mary Wroth, “Song (“Love a child is ever crying”)”
Thomas Wyatt, “The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor”
Elinor Wylie, “Wild Peaches”
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old”
William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”
William Butler Yeats, “No Second Troy”
William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”
Louis Zukofsky, “To My Wash Stand”
*
Anthologies surveyed:
The Broadview Anthology of Poetry, Second Edition, ed. Amanda Goldrick-Jones; Herbert Rosengarten (2008); Poems: A Concise Anthology, ed. Elizabeth Renker (2016); Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, ed. Robert Pinsky (2013); Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (1995) & Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (1995); 100 Best-Loved Poems (Dover Thrift Edition), ed. Philip Smith (1995); The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (2007); 101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions), ed. The American Poetry & Literacy Project (1998); The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, ed. Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris (2010); The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy (2003); The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson Ph.D., Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (2004); A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, ed. Czeslaw Milosz (1998); The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed. David Lehman (2006); The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, ed. Rita Dove (2011); Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Vol. 1, Second Edition, ed. Cary Nelson (2014) & Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Vol. 2, Second Edition, ed. Cary Nelson (2014); The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly (1999); The Top 500 Poems, ed. William Harmon (1992); Contemporary American Poetry, 8th edition, ed. A. Poulin Jr., Michael Waters (2005); Poetry 180, ed. Billy Collins (2003); American Poets in the 21st Century, ed. Claudia Rankine, Lisa Sewell (2007); The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd edition, Vol. 1, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair (2003) & The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd edition, Vol. 2, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair (2003)
