Most Famous English Poets

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love …

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (full poem)

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sonnet No. 18 (full poem)

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (full poem)

O my love’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my love’s like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune …

A Red, Red Rose (full poem)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? …

The Tyger (full poem)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils …

Daffodils (full poem)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown …

Ozymandias (full poem)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace …

Sonnet No. 43 (full poem)

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year …

Paul Revere’s Ride (full poem)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
”Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more.’ …

The Raven (full poem)

You’ll love me yet and I can tarry
Your love’s protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry
From seeds of April’s sowing …

You’ll love me yet and I can tarry (full poem)

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring …

O Captain! My Captain! (full poem)

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe …

Jabberwocky (full poem)

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

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.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed …

My Shadow (full poem)

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away …

When I was one-and-twenty (full poem)

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim …

Richard Cory (full poem)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below …

In Flanders Fields (full poem)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth …

The Road Not Taken (full poem)

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

…

Trees (full poem)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! …

The Hollow Men (full poem)

anyone lived in a pretty how town (full poem)

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore …

A dream deferred? (full poem)

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race …

The Germ (full poem)

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy (full poem)