Poem Guides
Featured Poem Guide
Emily Dickinson: “I Started Early — Took my Dog —”
The poet puts her vast imagination on display at the beach.
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Philip Larkin: “An Arundel Tomb”
Does a notoriously grumpy poet believe in everlasting love?
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AVAILABLE Walt Whitman: “A Passage to India”
Exploring the spiritual in the great master's ode to architecture.
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AVAILABLE Yusef Komunyakaa: “Facing It”
What happens when metaphor meets a monument?
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AVAILABLE Lucille Clifton: “won't you celebrate with me”
Lucille Clifton celebrates self-discovery in “won’t you celebrate with me.”
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AVAILABLE Louise Bogan: “A Tale”
Was her first poem her best?
Thom Gunn: “From the Wave”
Touch, risk, trust, improvisation—“the intellect as powerhouse of love.”
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AVAILABLE William Carlos Williams: “To a Poor Old Woman”
A poem from the Great Depression reveals the egalitarian nature of pleasure—and the formal innovation of a modernist master.
Amy Lowell: “The Garden by Moonlight”
Ezra Pound thought she ruined imagism, but her erotic lyricism turned it into a style all her own.
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AVAILABLE Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The Windhover”
A rapturous re-reading of the poet's love poem to life.
Charlotte Mew: “The Trees Are Down”
A poet anticipates the contemporary narrative lyric—and her own unfortunate end.
Walt Whitman: “Time to Come”
The young poet shows the first stirrings of genius.
Margaret Avison: “New Year's Poem”
How to balance image, thought, and story to convey the numinous.
Josephine Miles: “Cage”
An overlooked masterpiece depicts a feuding couple and the dreamy freedom just outside their door.
Linda Pastan: “The Deathwatch Beetle”
Pastan captures the sound of mortality while echoing Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Elizabeth Bishop: “The Moose”
How the poet devoted 20 years to immortalizing a moment in her classic poem.
Seamus Heaney: “Casualty”
In this “Troubles” elegy, the poet revisits a fisherman and pub-goer he once knew.
Lucille Clifton: “brothers”
The poet shines a bright new light on Lucifer, who answers God in a whirlwind of verse.
Robert Duncan: “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”
On Robert Duncan’s incantatory summons.
Donald Revell: “The Northeast Corridor”
Chronicle of a poet's rebirth in his Rust Belt poems.
Philip Larkin: “The Whitsun Weddings”
Philip Larkin swings.
Robert Hayden: “Those Winter Sundays”
A lost father warms a house.
Nikky Finney: “The Afterbirth, 1931”
“somethin’ wasn’t right:” How Finney captures an American nightmare.
Hart Crane: “Voyages”
Hart Crane's tour de force of homosexual love.
Emily Dickinson: “It was not death, for I stood up,”
Music and adolescent angst in the (18)80s.
James Dickey: “The Sheep Child”
Was James Dickey writing about bestiality just for kicks, or was he attempting to revive the pastoral tradition?
May Swenson: “Bleeding”
They say love cuts like a knife.
Robert Lowell: “Skunk Hour”
Witness the making of a new American poetics.
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AVAILABLE Sylvia Plath: “Fever 103º”
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in”—the incinerating vision of “Fever 103º.
Alexander Pope: “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
Did the poems of this 18th century poet prefigure modern hip-hop rivalries?
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AVAILABLE John Donne: “The Sun Rising”
The poet tries to start a revolution from his bed.
William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Just what does depend on that old wheelbarrow, anyway?
Robert Hass: “The Nineteenth Century as a Song”
Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.
Linda Bierds: “The Ghost Trio”
An exploration of the human imagination, with memories of a lost world.
Cesar Vallejo: “Under the Poplars”
The ambassador of South American surrealism.
Stevie Smith: “Not Waving but Drowning”
This poem finds its author not raving but frowning.
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AVAILABLE Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi”
In the realm of the world-class talkers.
How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry)
Curious about poetry, but don’t know where or how to begin? We’ve reprinted the first chapter from the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Its 16 sections provide strategies for reading poems, and each section has plenty of links to examples of poems in our archive to illustrate the points.
