The canon
The 50 most famous poems of all time
Some poems escape the page. They get recited at weddings and funerals, carved into gravestones, posted above stadium tunnels, and misquoted at graduations for two hundred years running. These are those poems — ranked, with the lines that made them immortal, and every one free to read in full.
Rankings are our editors', and arguments are welcome. What counts is fame outside the classroom: the poems people actually reach for when life demands a few perfect words.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost · 1916
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel both
The most famous — and most misread — American poem: the two roads, Frost admitted, were really much the same.
Read the full poem →If—
Rudyard Kipling · 1910
If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you;
Advice to a son, voted Britain's favourite poem — posted above Centre Court at Wimbledon.
Read the full poem →"Hope" is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson · 1891
"Hope" is the thing with feathers —That perches in the soul —
Hope as a small bird that keeps singing through the storm and never asks for anything back.
Read the full poem →Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
William Shakespeare · 1609
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
The most famous love poem in English — and at heart a poem about poetry itself: beauty fades, but these lines won't.
Read the full poem →The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
Nevermore — a bereaved scholar, a midnight visitor, and the most hypnotic rhythm in American poetry.
Read the full poem →Invictus
William Ernest Henley · 1888
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I am the master of my fate — written from a hospital bed; recited by Mandela on Robben Island.
Read the full poem →Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost · 1923
Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;
The woods are lovely, dark and deep — but there are promises to keep.
Read the full poem →Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · 1890
Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;
Death arrives as a courteous carriage driver — the most anthologized American poem about mortality.
Read the full poem →O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman · 1865
O Captain! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done,The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
Whitman's elegy for Lincoln — the ship safe in port, the captain fallen.
Read the full poem →Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Empire reduced to a broken statue in empty sand — the definitive poem about hubris.
Read the full poem →The Tyger
William Blake · 1794
Tyger, tyger, burning brightIn the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Read the full poem →I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,
The daffodils poem — memory replaying joy on the inward eye.
Read the full poem →Death, Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
John Donne · 1633
Death, be not proud, though some have callèd theeMighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
The most defiant funeral poem in English: one short sleep past, we wake eternally.
Read the full poem →How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
Written during a secret courtship; still the most counted-on love poem at weddings 170 years later.
Read the full poem →Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare · 1609
Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not love
The definitive wedding reading: love as the fixed star that does not bend, alter, or fade.
Read the full poem →Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe · 1849
It was many and many a year ago,In a kingdom by the sea,
Poe's last complete poem: a love so strong the angels envied it. Written for his young wife Virginia.
Read the full poem →Chapter I
Lewis Carroll · 1871
’Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wade;
The greatest nonsense poem in English — several of its invented words simply entered the dictionary.
Read the full poem →The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus · 1883
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Give me your tired, your poor — the sonnet on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.
Read the full poem →Fire and Ice
Robert Frost · 1920
Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.
How will the world end? Nine lines weigh desire against hatred and find both sufficient.
Read the full poem →She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron · 1814
She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;
Byron wrote it overnight after seeing his cousin in a black mourning dress at a party.
Read the full poem →A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
O my Luve is like a red, red roseThat's newly sprung in June;
Four stanzas of total devotion in Scots dialect — Bob Dylan called it the lyric that influenced him most.
Read the full poem →In Flanders Fields
John McCrae · 1915
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,
Written at a battlefield dressing station in 1915; the reason we wear poppies.
Read the full poem →The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1920
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — written in 1919's wreckage and quoted in every crisis since.
Read the full poem →To Autumn
John Keats · 1820
ISeason of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Often called the most perfect short poem in English.
Read the full poem →We Wear the Mask
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1895
We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
The public face forced over private pain — Dunbar's most unflinching poem.
Read the full poem →I, Too
Langston Hughes · 1926
I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.
Sent to eat in the kitchen, the darker brother laughs, eats well, grows strong — tomorrow he'll be at the table.
Read the full poem →Mother to Son
Langston Hughes · 1922
Well, son, I'll tell you:Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair — a mother's voice that keeps climbing, and orders you to keep climbing too.
Read the full poem →The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes · 1921
I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
Written on a train crossing the Mississippi when Hughes was seventeen: a soul grown deep as four ancient rivers.
Read the full poem →Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
Emily Dickinson · 1891
Wild nights! Wild nights!Were I with thee,
Twelve lines of pure longing.
Read the full poem →I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson · 1891
I'm nobody! Who are you?Are you nobody, too?
The friendliest takedown of fame ever written.
Read the full poem →Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost · 1923
Nature's first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.
Eight lines on why first things never last.
Read the full poem →When You Are Old
W. B. Yeats · 1893
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
Yeats asks the woman he loved his whole life to remember, in old age, the one man who loved her changing soul.
Read the full poem →The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Edward Lear · 1871
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to seaIn a beautiful pea-green boat;
A pea-green boat, a runcible spoon, and the best-loved nonsense romance ever written.
Read the full poem →Crossing the Bar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1889
Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me!
Death as a calm evening sea-crossing; Tennyson asked that it close every edition of his poems.
Read the full poem →A Psalm of Life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1838
WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is real! Life is earnest! — for decades the best-known poem in the English-speaking world.
Read the full poem →Abou Ben Adhem
Leigh Hunt · 1834
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men — and Ben Adhem's name leads all the rest.
Read the full poem →Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen · 1920
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
A gas attack witnessed at marching distance — and the old Lie about dying for your country, spat back.
Read the full poem →To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
Had we but World enough, and Time,This coyness Lady were no crime.
Had we but world enough, and time — the wittiest seize-the-day argument in English.
Read the full poem →The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe · 1599
Come live with me and be my love,And we will all the pleasures prove,
Christopher Marlowe's invitation — come live with me and be my love — launched four centuries of replies and parodies.
Read the full poem →Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
William Shakespeare · 1609
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
Shakespeare roasts every clichéd love poem ever written — then lands the most honest compliment of all.
Read the full poem →A Dream Within A Dream
Edgar Allan Poe · 1849
Take this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,
Sand slips through fingers; is anything we hold real at all?
Read the full poem →The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W. B. Yeats · 1890
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Yeats's daydream of escape, composed on a grey London pavement.
Read the full poem →My Shadow
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1885
I HAVE a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
From A Child's Garden of Verses — still the best poem about that little shadow that goes in and out with you.
Read the full poem →The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1854
Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,
Half a league, half a league — six hundred ride into the guns because someone had blunder'd.
Read the full poem →Paul Revere's Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1860
Listen my children and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
One if by land, and two if by sea — the midnight gallop that turned a messenger into a myth.
Read the full poem →Auld Lang Syne (Wikisource)
Robert Burns · 1788
Should old acquaintance be forgot,and never brought to mind ?
The song the whole world sings at midnight on December 31 — here in its original form.
Read the full poem →The Lamb
William Blake · 1789
Little Lamb, who made thee Dost thou know who made thee,
The Tyger's gentle twin from Songs of Innocence.
Read the full poem →A Poison Tree
William Blake · 1794
I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
Anger told dies; anger hidden gets watered into a tree with a poisoned apple — the shortest anatomy of a grudge.
Read the full poem →Leisure
W. H. Davies · 1911
What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare — the supertramp poet's case for doing nothing.
Read the full poem →Sympathy
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1899
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
I know why the caged bird sings — the line that gave Maya Angelou her title.
Read the full poem →