The Definitive List of 100 Poems to Read Before You Die
And 10 Overrated Poems You Can Skip
Several months ago, heading up Fifth Avenue in heels in the middle of the night, I typed out 100 of the best novels of all-time on my phone screen, raging against a list I had seen elsewhere on Substack of classics you must read before you die. My late-night musings soon became my wildly popular Definitive List of 100 Classic Novels to Read Before You Die.
I mentioned in my recent Top 10 Poets of All Time post that I studied poetry at Columbia and that I would love to bring more poems to more people here on Pens and Poison. Therefore, I thought I’d do the same today poetry and write out 100 poems you must read before you depart this earth.
Some notes on my selection process:
There are many longer works written in poetic form—e.g. The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost—that I left off because I felt that it would not be fair to compare Paradise Lost to, say, Ode to a Nightingale. Admittedly, my judgement of what counts as a shorter vs. longer poem is somewhat arbitrary, as you will see Eliot’s Four Quartets and Coleridge’s Christabel on my list, but I suppose that the distinction boils down to works we refer to as “poems” versus works we refer to as “books.”1 I suppose we might think of the “long poem” category as “epics,” though The Canterbury Tales isn’t really an epic.
Anyway. You get the idea.
I don’t believe that there are as many great poets out there as there are novelists, so you might see the same poet taking up several slots if their poems are just that good.
I might have also gone overboard on the footnote commentary, but if you want to be entertained, make sure to check out my footnotes.
Again, I have only included poems that I have read, and I am sure that there are other poems that would make the list that I have not yet read. Perhaps, if I do encounter a poem I find worthy of this list in the future, I shall make appropriate amends.
I am restricting this list to English-language poems because otherwise we would be here all day.
Without further ado, following on the heels of my Definitive List of 100 Classic Novels to Read Before You Die, here comes Liza’s Definitive List of 100 Poems to Read Before You Die.
100 Poems to Read Before You Die
Astrophel and Stella - Sonnet 1 - Sir Philip Sidney
Epithalamion - Edmund Spenser
My Love Is Like To Ice - Edmund Spenser
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love - Christopher Marlowe
Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare
Sonnet 29 - William Shakespeare
Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare
Sonnet 30 - William Shakespeare
The Flea - John Donne
No Man Is an Island - John Donne2
The Garden - Andrew Marvell
Methought I Saw - John Milton3
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day - John Dryden
The Tyger - William Blake
The Garden of Love - William Blake
The Little Girl Lost - William Blake
Auld Lang Syne - Robert Burns4
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth5
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 - William Wordsworth
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Christabel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
So We'll Go No More a Roving - George Gordon, Lord Byron6
She Walks in Beauty - George Gordon, Lord Byron
Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley7
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer - John Keats8
When I Have Fears - John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes - John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci - John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn - John Keats
Bright Star - John Keats
To Autumn - John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats9
How Do I Love Thee? - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A Musical Instrument - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A Psalm of Life - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow10
The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe
The Kraken - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Lotos-Eaters - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ulysses - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Break, Break, Break - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Lady of Shalott - Alfred, Lord Tennyson11
Porphyria’s Lover - Robert Browning
Shakespeare - Matthew Arnold12
The Scholar-Gypsy - Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold
I’m Nobody! - Emily Dickinson
Hope - Emily Dickinson
There is No Frigate Like a Book - Emily Dickinson13
O Captain! My Captain! - Walt Whitman
Invictus - William Ernest Henley14
Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
The Garden of Proserpine - Algernon Charles Swinburne
The New Colossus - Emma Lazarus
When I Was One-and-Twenty - A.E. Housman15
Self-Pity - D.H. Lawrence
No Second Troy - W.B. Yeats
Leda and the Swan - W.B. Yeats
Lullaby - W.B. Yeats
The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats
Impression du Matin - Oscar Wilde
We Wear the Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar
If - Rudyard Kipling
Mending Wall - Robert Frost
The Silken Tent - Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
Stars - Robert Frost16
In Flanders Fields - John McCrae
The Snow Man - Wallace Stevens17
Sunday Morning - Wallace Stevens
Gubbinal - Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West - Wallace Stevens
The World as Meditation - Wallace Stevens
Portrait of a Lady - William Carlos Williams18
The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say - William Carlos Williams
Portrait d’une Femme - Ezra Pound
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - Ezra Pound
The Sea of Glass - Ezra Pound
In a Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot19
Portrait of a Lady - T.S. Eliot
Preludes - T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot
The Hollow Men - T.S. Eliot
Gerontion - T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
The Shield of Achilles - W.H. Auden
Musée des Beaux Arts - W.H. Auden
In the Waiting Room - Elizabeth Bishop
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas
Aubade - Philip Larkin
The Painter - John Ashberry
Her Kind - Anne Sexton
Theology - Ted Hughes
Dreams - Langston Hughes
Harlem - Langston Hughes
Daddy - Sylvia Plath
Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath20
10 Overrated Poems You Can Skip
Anything by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Literally anything.
Love’s Philosophy - Percy Bysshe Shelley21
The White Man's Burden - Rudyard Kipling22
Anything by Gertrude Stein because apparently she wrote more poems beyond Tender Buttons, the worst poem ever written in the English language…? Why?23
Anything by E. E. Cummings24
Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden25
Still I Rise - Maya Angelou
Howl - Allen Ginsberg
Digging - Seamus Heaney
Poetry - Marianne Moore26
I have not included Rupi Kaur or Ocean Vuong on this list because they are not poets.
If you would like to contest my list—and call me an ignoramus and a dullard in the process—I readily accept the challenge and invite you to create your own definitive poem ranking. Until then, I will operate under the assumption that this is the best list that you will ever find.
You can also fight it out in the comments, but that is less interesting.27
Happy poetry reading!
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Though these categories might be somewhat arbitrary as well.
My fourth grade homeroom teacher made us memorize this poem. It contains the famous line “for whom the bell tolls” that our friend Hemingway later appropriated for his novel of the same name.
Milton’s best work is really Paradise Lost, but since I prohibited myself from adding longer works on here, this is my favorite short poem of his.
This is your daily reminder that this popular New Year’s Song is actually a famous poem by Robert Burns, the poet whose other claim to fame is providing the inspiration for the title of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Also leaving out The Prelude for the reasons outlined above.
Byron is perhaps better known for his longer works. Don’t forget to check out Don Juan, Manfred, and Childe Harold.
This might be a “me” problem, but Shelley has never really spoken to me in the way that Byron, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth do. “Ozymandias” is a great poem. His others pale in comparison.
Here comes the torrent of lines containing my Keats obsession. While the other girls in high school were fangirling over Justin Bieber, I had a framed photograph of Keats on my desk.
That concludes the Keats section of this post, but, honestly, read everything by Keats. The fact that this man was only 25 when he died is truly remarkable. I might have given Keats even more slots than my favorite poet of all-time, T.S. Eliot. Damn.
This poem was not in the Norton Anthology! Shame on them.
On my 18th birthday, I went around Chicago with a framed picture of Tennyson. When people asked me why I was carrying a picture of a random old man, I told them it was Tennyson, and he shared my birthday. Thus began my love of Tennyson. Not featured on this list are In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, both of which are also worth reading.
Matthew Arnold is criminally underrated as a poet. Everyone just reads Dover Beach, which is a great poem, but he wrote so many other classics.
I was introduced to the poems of Dickinson by a good friend of mine in the sixth grade. We read poetry together up until college, when she went to Barnard and became a far-leftist and then never talked to me again. One must be extra careful with the poetry crowd.
This poem inspired the name of my company, Invictus Prep :)
This poem did not make sense to me until after I turned twenty-two. Now, it makes a lot of sense.
Ending our Frost section with a lesser-known Frost poem.
I am not going to tell the story of the first time I read “The Snow Man” again, but you can find it here.
The first of three poems on this list called “Portrait of a Lady.”
THE MOMENT YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR… T.S. ELIOT!!!
This is around the time that poems will start to get bad, so we shall stop here.
People are going to go after me for this one, and I don’t hate this poem, but I think it’s wildly overrated. It gives me “the ick.
I’m not putting this here because it’s a racist poem, I am putting it here because it’s just not a very good poem.
I regret to inform you that even Rupi Kaur poems might be better than Tender Buttons.
We did not need this man to come in and start the poetic revolution of sad teenagers refusing to capitalize letters.
I don’t dislike Auden, but this is apparently his most famous poem, and he has way better stuff.
If you need to write a poem convincing people to read your poetry, then you have failed.
Yes, I was lazy enough today to plagiarize the closing paragraphs of my Definitive List of 100 Classic Novels to Read Before You Die, but I just finished writing a novel, so one must give me a break.
Kipling might be the English poet who appeals the most to us foreigners beyond the Anglosphere. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's the very regular and rythmic meter that makes it clear that it follows some rule, even when the rule is not entirely evident. But I've seen it time and again - even in folks who otherwise don't care for poetry.
A solid list. Tinturn Abbey and Grey’s Elegy would be good additions