Poetry
Language stripped to the wire. Homer to Ocean Vuong.
97 essential works
The Iliad
Homer
750 BCE · Ancient Greece
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The Odyssey
Homer
700 BCE · Ancient Greece
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Poems and Fragments
Sappho
c. 610–570 BCE · Ancient Greece / Lesbos
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The Aeneid
Virgil
29–19 BCE · Roman Empire
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
8 CE · Roman Empire
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Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī)
1248 · Persia / present-day Afghanistan and Turkey
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The Masnavi (Spiritual Couplets)
Rumi
1258 · Persia
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Divan-e Hafez
Hafez (Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī)
1315 · Persia / Shiraz
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Collected Poems
Li Bai (Li Po)
c. 701–762 CE · Tang Dynasty China
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Collected Poems
Du Fu
c. 712–770 CE · Tang Dynasty China
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi)
Matsuo Basho
1689 · Japan
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Canzoniere (Songbook)
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)
1327 · Italy
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Gitanjali (Song Offerings)
Rabindranath Tagore
1910 · India / Bengal
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The Year of My Life (Oraga Haru)
Kobayashi Issa
1819 · Japan
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The August Sleepwalker
Bei Dao (Zhao Zhenkai)
1988 · China
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Old Playhouse and Other Poems
Kamala Das
1973 · India / Kerala
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Labyrinths with Path of Thunder
Christopher Okigbo
1971 · Nigeria
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Idanre and Other Poems
Wole Soyinka
1967 · Nigeria
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The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
1308 · Italy
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Paradise Lost
John Milton
1667 · England
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Sonnets
William Shakespeare
1609 · England
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Songs of Innocence and of Experience
William Blake
1794 · England
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The Prelude
William Wordsworth
1799 · England
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Selected Poems
John Keats
1820 · England
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Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1820 · England
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In Memoriam A.H.H.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1850 · England
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Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)
Charles Baudelaire
1857 · France
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Poems
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1918 · England
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A Season in Hell / Illuminations
Arthur Rimbaud
1873 · France
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Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones)
Eugenio Montale
1925 · Italy
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Fernando Pessoa
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
1934 · Portugal
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Collected Poems
Constantine Cavafy (Konstantinos P. Kavafis)
1896 · Alexandria, Egypt / Greece
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Duino Elegies / Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke
1923 · Austria/Germany
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Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedächtnis)
Paul Celan
1952 · Romania/Germany/France
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Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
1855 · United States
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The Complete Poems
Emily Dickinson
1858 · United States
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North of Boston
Robert Frost
1914 · United States
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The Waste Land and Other Poems
T.S. Eliot
1922 · United States/England
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Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot
1943 · United States/England
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The Cantos
Ezra Pound
1917 · United States
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Harmonium
Wallace Stevens
1923 · United States
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Spring and All
William Carlos Williams
1923 · United States
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Trilogy
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
1944 · United States/England
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Complete Poems
Marianne Moore
1967 · United States
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The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
1926 · United States
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Another Time
W.H. Auden
1940 · England/United States
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Complete Poems
Elizabeth Bishop
1969 · United States/Brazil
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Life Studies
Robert Lowell
1959 · United States
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Ariel
Sylvia Plath
1965 · United States/England
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Howl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg
1956 · United States
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Annie Allen
Gwendolyn Brooks
1949 · United States
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The Whitsun Weddings
Philip Larkin
1964 · England
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The Dream Songs
John Berryman
1969 · United States
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Live or Die
Anne Sexton
1966 · United States
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Requiem
Anna Akhmatova
1935 · Russia
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Selected Poems
Osip Mandelstam
1913 · Russia
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After Russia (Posle Rossii)
Marina Tsvetaeva
1928 · Russia/France
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A Part of Speech
Joseph Brodsky
1977 · Russia/United States
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New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001
Czesław Miłosz
2001 · Poland/United States
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View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
Wisława Szymborska
1995 · Poland
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Mr Cogito
Zbigniew Herbert
1974 · Poland
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The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
Tomas Tranströmer
2006 · Sweden
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Trilce
César Vallejo
1922 · Peru
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Poemas Humanos / Human Poems
César Vallejo
1939 · Peru/Spain/France
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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
1924 · Chile
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Canto General
Pablo Neruda
1950 · Chile
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Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)
Octavio Paz
1957 · Mexico
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Selected Poetry
Mahmoud Darwish
1960 · Palestine
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North
Seamus Heaney
1975 · Ireland
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Omeros
Derek Walcott
1990 · Saint Lucia / Caribbean
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The Wild Iris
Louise Glück
1992 · United States
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Averno
Louise Glück
2006 · United States
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Collected Poems
Ted Hughes
2003 · England
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Crow
Ted Hughes
1970 · England
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The Maximus Poems
Charles Olson
1960 · United States
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The Collected Poems
Frank O'Hara
1971 · United States
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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashbery
1975 · United States
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Mercian Hymns
Geoffrey Hill
1971 · England
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Devotions
Mary Oliver
2017 · United States
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Erosion
Jorie Graham
1983 · United States
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Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
1998 · Canada
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If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Anne Carson (translation)
2002 · Canada/Ancient Greece
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Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
2014 · United States
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Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Ross Gay
2015 · United States
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The Tradition
Jericho Brown
2019 · United States
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The Carrying
Ada Limón
2018 · United States (Latina) (English)
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What the Living Do
Marie Howe
1997 · United States
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Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz
2020 · United States (Mojave/Native American) (English)
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Neon Vernacular
Yusef Komunyakaa
1993 · United States
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Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996
Seamus Heaney
1998 · Ireland
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Collected Poems
W.B. Yeats
1950 · Ireland
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Tender Buttons
Gertrude Stein
1914 · United States/France
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The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton
2012 · United States
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American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Terrance Hayes
2018 · USA
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Don't Call Us Dead
Danez Smith
2017 · USA
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Native Guard
Natasha Trethewey
2006 · USA
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The Nightfields
Joanna Klink
2020 · USA
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