A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
Villanelle for an Anniversary, Seamus Heaney, 1996
1800s Through 1960
- Ode 1.11, Horace
- Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816
- Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
- Daffodils, William Wordsworth, c 1840
- A Dream Within a Dream, Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
- Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1854
- The Past, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1867
- Invictus, William Ernest Henley, 1875
- The Builders, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Crossing the Bar, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1889
- When You Are Old, William Butler Yeats, c1890s.
- Preludes, T.S. Eliot, 1910
- Trees, Joyce Kilmer, 1914
- The Soldier, Rupert Brook, 1914
- The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost, 1916
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, 1920
- Medusa, Louise Bogan, 1920
- Fog, Robert Hillyer, 1921
- He Goads Himself, Louis Untermeyer, 1921
- If You Should Go, Countee Cullen, 1922
- The House on the Hill, Edwin Arlington Robinson, c1925
- Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats, 1927
- Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, Mary Elizabeth Frye, 1932
- Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1937
- The Courage That My Mother Had, Edna St. Vincent Millay, c.1940
- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas, 1947
- The Waking, Theodore Roethke, 1953
- Heart’s Needle, W.D. Snodgrass, 1959
- Morning Song, Sylvia Plath, 1960
- Chicago, Carl Sandburg, c1960
- One Art, Elizabeth Bishop, c1960
- I Am in Need of Music, Elizabeth Bishop, c1960
- Constantly Risking Absurdity, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, c1960
- The Poet at Seven, Donald Justice, 1960
“Favorite Poems II: 1963 to Present” continued here
Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.”
Carl Sandburg