Poetry helps us express ourselves and live better. Discover great poets from across the centuries!
Our favorite Classic Poetry authors
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The Hill We Climb
By Amanda GormanAmanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing.
Ledger
By Jane HirshfieldA pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate, from the internationally renowned poet.
Postcolonial Love Poem
By Natalie DiazNatalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds.
An American Sunrise
By Joy HarjoHarjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared.
Sailing Alone Around the Room
By Billy CollinsThese poems show Collins performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may begin with the everyday and end in the infinite.
The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
By Langston HughesLangston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career.
Poems
By Elizabeth BishopThis is the definitive edition of the work of one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th Century. Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up.
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
By Pablo NerudaIn his work a continent awakens to consciousness," wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers.
Cane
By Jean ToomerPublished in 1923, this book was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Cane is a mosaic of intricately connected poems, stories, songs, and dialogues.
Sonnets from the Portuguese
By Elizabeth Barrett BrowningA collection of forty-four love sonnets that went on to become some of the most famous and critically-acclaimed love sonnets to this day.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
By Omar KhayyámEdward FitzGerald triggered a poetic revolution in Victorian England upon his translation of a medieval Iranian mathematician, philosopher, scholar, and poet. One critic compared the impact of this book to the effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
New Hampshire
By Robert FrostKnown for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Divine Comedy
By Dante AlighieriWriting between 1308 and 1320, Dante answers the age-old question with his poetic vision: what does the afterlife look like? This three-volume epic poem describes in great detail the systematic levels in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Eugene Onegin
By Alexander PushkinPushkin’s novel in verse was and is a huge influence on Russian literature. Its unusual verse structure combined with Pushkin’s own commentary on the social canvas of the time has meant that it has remained relevant and read to this day.