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.

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100 Poems to Read Before You Die

1. Astrophel and Stella - Sonnet 1 - Sir Philip Sidney

2. Epithalamion - Edmund Spenser

3. My Love Is Like To Ice - Edmund Spenser

4. The Passionate Shepherd to His Love - Christopher Marlowe

5. Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare

6. Sonnet 29 - William Shakespeare

7. Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare

8. Sonnet 30 - William Shakespeare

9. The Flea - John Donne

10. No Man Is an Island - John Donne²

11. The Garden - Andrew Marvell

12. Methought I Saw - John Milton³

13. A Song for St. Cecilia's Day - John Dryden

14. The Tyger - William Blake

15. The Garden of Love - William Blake

16. The Little Girl Lost - William Blake

17. Auld Lang Syne - Robert Burns⁴

18. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth⁵

19. Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 - William Wordsworth

20. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21. Christabel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

22. Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

23. So We'll Go No More a Roving - George Gordon, Lord Byron⁶

24. She Walks in Beauty - George Gordon, Lord Byron

25. Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley⁷

26. On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer - John Keats⁸

27. When I Have Fears - John Keats

28. The Eve of St. Agnes - John Keats

29. La Belle Dame Sans Merci - John Keats

30. Ode on a Grecian Urn - John Keats

31. Bright Star - John Keats

32. To Autumn - John Keats

33. Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats⁹

34. How Do I Love Thee? - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

35. A Musical Instrument - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

36. A Psalm of Life - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow¹⁰

37. The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe

38. Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe

39. The Kraken - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

40. The Lotos-Eaters - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

41. Ulysses - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

42. Break, Break, Break - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

43. The Lady of Shalott - Alfred, Lord Tennyson¹¹

44. Porphyria’s Lover - Robert Browning

45. Shakespeare - Matthew Arnold¹²

46. The Scholar-Gypsy - Matthew Arnold

47. Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold

48. I’m Nobody! - Emily Dickinson

49. Hope - Emily Dickinson

50. There is No Frigate Like a Book - Emily Dickinson¹³

51. O Captain! My Captain! - Walt Whitman

52. Invictus - William Ernest Henley¹⁴

53. Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

54. The Garden of Proserpine - Algernon Charles Swinburne

55. The New Colossus - Emma Lazarus

56. When I Was One-and-Twenty - A.E. Housman¹⁵

57. Self-Pity - D.H. Lawrence

58. No Second Troy - W.B. Yeats

59. Leda and the Swan - W.B. Yeats

60. Lullaby - W.B. Yeats

61. The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats

62. Impression du Matin - Oscar Wilde

63. We Wear the Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar

64. If - Rudyard Kipling

65. Mending Wall - Robert Frost

66. The Silken Tent - Robert Frost

67. The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

68. Stars - Robert Frost¹⁶

69. In Flanders Fields - John McCrae

70. The Snow Man - Wallace Stevens¹⁷

71. Sunday Morning - Wallace Stevens

72. Gubbinal - Wallace Stevens

73. The Idea of Order at Key West - Wallace Stevens

74. The World as Meditation - Wallace Stevens

75. Portrait of a Lady - William Carlos Williams¹⁸

76. The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams

77. This Is Just to Say - William Carlos Williams

78. Portrait d’une Femme - Ezra Pound

79. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - Ezra Pound

80. The Sea of Glass - Ezra Pound

81. In a Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound

82. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot¹⁹

83. Portrait of a Lady - T.S. Eliot

84. Preludes - T.S. Eliot

85. The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot

86. The Hollow Men - T.S. Eliot

87. Gerontion - T.S. Eliot

88. Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot

89. The Shield of Achilles - W.H. Auden

90. Musée des Beaux Arts - W.H. Auden

91. In the Waiting Room - Elizabeth Bishop

92. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas

93. Aubade - Philip Larkin

94. The Painter - John Ashberry

95. Her Kind - Anne Sexton

96. Theology - Ted Hughes

97. Dreams - Langston Hughes

98. Harlem - Langston Hughes

99. Daddy - Sylvia Plath

100. Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath²⁰

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10 Overrated Poems You Can Skip

1. Anything by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Literally anything.

2. Love’s Philosophy - Percy Bysshe Shelley²¹

3. The White Man's Burden - Rudyard Kipling²²

4. Anything by Gertrude Stein because apparently she wrote more poems beyond Tender Buttons, the worst poem ever written in the English language…? Why?²³

5. Anything by E. E. Cummings²⁴

6. Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden²⁵

7. Still I Rise - Maya Angelou

8. Howl - Allen Ginsberg

9. Digging - Seamus Heaney

10. Poetry - Marianne Moore²⁶

I have not included Rupi Kaur or Ocean Vuong on this list because they are not poets.

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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!

Enjoyed this post? You can Buy Me a Coffee so that I’ll be awake for the next one. If you don’t like buying other people things, you can buy yourself my latest poetry book. Or, if you are a starving artist, you can also just follow me on Instagram or “X.”

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1. Though these categories might be somewhat arbitrary as well.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Also leaving out The Prelude for the reasons outlined above.

6. Byron is perhaps better known for his longer works. Don’t forget to check out Don Juan, Manfred, and Childe Harold.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. This poem was not in the Norton Anthology! Shame on them.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. This poem inspired the name of my company, Invictus Prep :)

15. This poem did not make sense to me until after I turned twenty-two. Now, it makes a lot of sense.

16. Ending our Frost section with a lesser-known Frost poem.

17. I am not going to tell the story of the first time I read “The Snow Man” again, but you can find it here.

18. The first of three poems on this list called “Portrait of a Lady.”

19. THE MOMENT YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR… T.S. ELIOT!!!

20. This is around the time that poems will start to get bad, so we shall stop here.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. I regret to inform you that even Rupi Kaur poems might be better than Tender Buttons.

24. We did not need this man to come in and start the poetic revolution of sad teenagers refusing to capitalize letters.

25. I don’t dislike Auden, but this is apparently his most famous poem, and he has way better stuff.

26. If you need to write a poem convincing people to read your poetry, then you have failed.

27. 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.