Otherwise known as “ the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English.” Just ask our hero Joan Didion. Still the most iconic nonsense poem ever written. Particularly popular in Canada, where McCrae is from. Probably the most iconic-and most quoted-poem from WWI. Most people only recognize the first couplets anyway.Ī uniquely American poem, written in 1978, that should be outdated by now, but still is not.įrank O’Hara, “ Meditations in an Emergency“ Like Dickinson, we could have put several of Shakespeare’s sonnets in this slot. William Shakespeare, “ Sonnet 18” (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) We know, we know, it’s all your parents’ fault. He calls to every poet after him, such as Ezra Pound, who notes in “A Pact” that Whitman “broke the new wood.”” “Whitman reinvents American poetry in this peerless self-performance,” Parini writes, “finding cadences that seem utterly his own yet somehow keyed to the energy and rhythms of a young nation waking to its own voice and vision. The most famous poem from Whitman’s celebrated Leaves of Grass, and selected by Jay Parini as the best American poem of all time. Blake famously wrote music to go along with his poems-the originals have been lost, but this verse has been widely interpreted by musicians as well as repeated to many sleepy children.Īs (further) immortalized by John Steinbeck. Serena Williams is into it, which is proof enough for me.īecause a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. See also: “ The Fish.”Īccording to someone in the Literary Hub office who would know, this poem is all over sports stadiums and locker rooms. cummings, “ i carry your heart with me“Īll else aside, the fact that it starts with hating poetry has made it a favorite among schoolchildren of all ages. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “ We Wear the Mask“ĭunbar’s most famous poem, and arguably his best, which biographer Paul Revell described as “a moving cry from the heart of suffering. The poem anticipates, and presents in terms of passionate personal regret, the psychological analysis of the fact of blackness in Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, with a penetrating insight into the reality of the black man’s plight in America.”Į.e. One of those poems passed hand to hand between undergraduates who will grow up to become writers. We had some votes for “ Annabel Lee,” on account of its earworminess, but among the many appearances and references of Poe in pop culture, “The Raven” is certainly the most common. Or Citizen Kane? (See also: “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”) I mean, have you seen Interstellar? (Or Dangerous Minds or Independence Day?) ”ĭylan Thomas, “ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” Even the least literate of your friends would probably recognize the line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. With On the Road, the most enduring piece of literature from the mythologized Beat Generation, and of the two, the better one. But please see also: “ The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” This one takes the cake for the sheer number of “thirteen ways of looking at x” knockoffs that I’ve seen. Wallace Stevens, “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” The most anthologized poem of the last 25 years for a reason. See also: “ This is Just to Say,” which, among other things, has spawned a host of memes and parodies. William Carlos Williams, “ The Red Wheelbarrow” But for now, happy reading (and re-reading):
#Rita dove famous poems free
Finally, despite the headline, I’m sure there are many, many iconic poems out there that I’ve missed-so feel free to extend this list in the comments. I also excluded book-length poems, because they’re really a different form. NB that I limited myself to one poem per poet-which means that the impetus for this list actually gets bumped for the widely quoted (and misunderstood) “The Road Not Taken,” but so it goes. (What makes a poem iconic? For our purposes here, it’s primarily a matter of cultural ubiquity, though unimpeachable excellence helps any case.) So for those of you who were not present for our epic office argument, I have listed some of them here.
Turns out, despite frequent (false) claims that poetry is dead and/or irrelevant and/or boring, there are plenty of poems that have sunk deep into our collective consciousness as cultural icons. Today is the anniversary of the publication of Robert Frost’s iconic poem “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a fact that spurred the Literary Hub office into a long conversation about their favorite poems, the most iconic poems written in English, and which poems we should all have already read (or at least be reading next).
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