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Portal:Poetry

Introduction

The Parnassus (1511) by Raphael: famous poets recite alongside the nine Muses atop Mount Parnassus.

Poetry (the term derives from a variant of the Greek term, poiesis, "making") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Poetry has a very long history, dating back to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry in Africa, and panegyric and elegiac court poetry was developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile, Niger and Volta river valleys . Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa can be found among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE, while the Epic of Sundiata is one of the most well-known examples of griot court poetry. The earliest Western Asian epic poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing.

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Selected general articles

  • The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound collected eleven poets in the first anthology of Imagist poetry, Des Imagistes (1914). (Pound is pictured in 1963.)


    Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry since the Pre-Raphaelites. As a poetic style it gave modernism its start in the early 20th century, and is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".

    The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry, in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tradition. Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, and a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms; Imagists used free verse. A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. This feature mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's ideogrammic method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image. Read more...
  • Sindhi Literature

    Sindhi poetry (Sindhi: سنڌي شاعري ‎) continues an oral tradition dating back a thousand years. The verbal verses were based on folk tales. Sindhi is one of the oldest languages of the Indus Valley having a peculiar literary colour both in poetry and prose. Sindhi poetry is very rich in thought as well as contain variety of genres like other developed languages. Old Sindhi poetry impacts upon contemporary languages and also accepts the healthy influence of some languages like Hindi. Sindhi poetry contains two main original forms of verse, such as bait and Waei. Bait slightly resembles with form Dohas and Sorthas, moreover also influenced by Persian forms like Ghazal, Mathnavi, Rubai, and Kaafi. Since the 1940s, Sindhi poetry has incorporated broader influences including the sonnet and blank verse. Soon after the independence of Pakistan in 1947, these forms were reinforced by Triolet, Haiku, Renga and Tanka etc. At present, these forms continue to co-exist, albeit in a varying degree, with Azad Nazm having an edge over them all. Read more...
  • An ancient inscription in Nepali language in Dullu municipality in Dailekh district in Nepal

    Nepali literature (Nepali: नेपाली साहित्य) refers to the literature written in Nepali language inside Nepal as well as in any part of the world. The Nepali language has been the national language of Nepal since 1958.

    Nepali language evolved from Sanskrit and it is difficult to exactly date the history of Nepali language literature since most of the early scholars wrote in Sanskrit. It is, however, possible to roughly divide Nepali literature into five periods. Read more...
  • Anglo-Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English are terms used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language literature; as such it is perhaps the youngest branch of English-language literature in the British Isles.

    Welsh writers in English in the early twentieth century favoured the short story form over the novel. This was for two main reasons: in a society lacking sufficient wealth to support professional writers, the amateur writer was able to spare time only for short bursts of creativity; and, like poetry, it concentrated linguistic delight and exuberance. However, the genre did not develop in these writers much beyond its origin in rural sketches. Satire was avoided, and, since the main market was London publishers, the short stories tended to focus on the eccentricities (as seen from a metropolitan viewpoint) of Welsh life. Read more...
  • Punjabi literature, specifically literary works written in the Punjabi language, is characteristic of the historical Punjab of India and Pakistan and the Punjabi diaspora. The Punjabi language is written in several scripts, of which the Shahmukhi and Gurmukhī scripts are the most commonly used in Pakistan and India, respectively. Read more...
  • Literature of Kashmir has a long history, the oldest texts having been composed in the Sanskrit language. Early names include Patanjali, the author of the Mahabhashya commentary on Pāṇini's grammar, suggested by some to have been the same to write the Hindu treatise known as the Yogasutra, and Dridhbala, who revised the Charaka Samhita of Ayurveda.

    In medieval times, philosophers of Kashmir Shaivism include Vasugupta (c. 800), Utpala (c. 925), Abhinavagupta, and Kshemaraja as well as Anandavardhana. Read more...
  • Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration “anywhere, out of the world.”


    Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.

    In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Read more...
  • Title page, second (posthumous) edition of Anne Bradstreet's poems, 1678
    American poetry is poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies (although before this unification, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.

    The history of American poetry is not easy to know. Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other cultural groupings. Read more...
  • The objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.

    The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting. Later, another American poet, Lorine Niedecker, became associated with the group. A number of other poets were included in early publications under the Objectivist rubric without actually sharing the attitudes and approaches to poetry of this core group. Although these poets generally suffered critical neglect, especially in their early careers, and a number of them abandoned the practice of writing and/or publishing poetry for a time, they were to prove highly influential for later generations of writers working in the tradition of modernist poetry in English. Read more...
  • The ancient Hebrews perceived that there were poetical portions in their sacred texts, as shown by their entitling as songs or chants passages such as Exodus 15:1-19 and Numbers 21:17-20; a song or chant (shir) is, according to the primary meaning of the term, poetry. The question as to whether the poetical passages of the Old Testament show signs of regular rhythm or meter is yet unsolved. Read more...
  • Marathi poetry is a poetry written in the Marathi language, including its various dialects. Marathi is one of the official languages of India. Read more...
  • The Misty Poets (Chinese: 朦胧诗人; pinyin: Ménglóng Shīrén) are a group of 20th-century Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution.
    They are so named because their work has been officially denounced as "obscure", "misty", or "hazy" poetry (menglong shi). But according to Gu Cheng, "the defining characteristic of this new type of poetry is its realism—it begins with objective realism but veers towards a subjective realism; it moves from a passive reaction toward active creation." The movement was initially centered on the magazine Jintian (Chinese: 今天; pinyin: Jīntiān; literally: "Today"), which was founded by Bei Dao and Mang Ke and published from 1978 until 1980, when it was banned.

    Guo Lusheng is among the earliest poets of the sent-down youth generation poets and was an inspiration for several of the original Misty Poets. Five important misty poets, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, He Dong and Yang Lian, were exiled after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Jintian was resurrected in Sweden in 1990 as a forum for expatriate Chinese writers. Read more...
  • Guernésiais, also known as Dgèrnésiais, Guernsey French, and Guernsey Norman French, is the variety of the Norman language spoken in Guernsey. It is sometimes known on the island simply as "patois". As one of the langues d'oïl, it has its roots in Latin, but has had strong influence from both Old Norse and English at different points in its history.

    There is mutual intelligibility (with some difficulty) with Jèrriais speakers from Jersey and Continental Norman speakers from Normandy. Guernésiais most closely resembles the Norman dialect of Cotentinais spoken at la Hague in the Cotentin Peninsula. Read more...
  • Image of Ernst's 1921 painting, "The Elephant Celebes"
    Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, 1921, Tate London

    Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality".

    Works of surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Read more...
  • Sage Agastya, Chairman of the first Tamil Sangam, Madurai, Pandiya Kingdom. Statue in Tamil Thai temple, Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu.

    Tamil literature (Tamil: தமிழ் இலக்கியம்) refers to the literature in the Tamil language. Tamil literature has a rich and long literary tradition spanning more than two thousand years. The oldest extant works show signs of maturity indicating an even longer period of evolution. Contributors to the Tamil literature are mainly from Tamil people from South India, including the land now comprising Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Sri Lankan Tamils from Sri Lanka, and from Tamil diaspora. The history of Tamil literature follows the history of Tamil Nadu, closely following the social, political and cultural trends of various periods. The early Sangam literature, starting from the period of 2nd century BCE (Akananuru (1, 15, 31, 55, 61, 65, 91, 97, 101, 115, 127, 187, 197, 201, 211, 233, 251, 265, 281, 311, 325, 331, 347, 349, 359, 393, 281, 295), Kurunthogai (11), Natrinai (14, 75) are dated before 300 BCE), contain anthologies of various poets dealing with many aspects of life, including love, war, social values and religion. This was followed by the early epics and moral literature, authored by Hindu, Jain and Buddhist authors, lasting up to the 5th century CE. From the 6th to 12th century CE, the Tamil devotional poems written by Nayanmars (sages of Shaivism) and Alvars (sages of Vaishnavism), heralded the great Bhakti movement which later engulfed the entire Indian subcontinent. It is during this era that some of the grandest of Tamil literary classics like Kambaramayanam and Periya Puranam were authored and many poets were patronized by the imperial Chola and Pandya empires. The later medieval period saw many assorted minor literary works and also contributions by a few Muslim and European authors.

    A revival of Tamil literature took place from the late 19th century when works of religious and philosophical nature were written in a style that made it easier for the common people to enjoy. The modern Tamil literary movement started with Subramania Bharathi, the multifaceted Indian Nationalist poet and author, and was quickly followed up by many who began to utilize the power of literature in influencing the masses. With growth of literacy, Tamil prose began to blossom and mature. Short stories and novels began to appear. Modern Tamil literary criticism also evolved. The popularity of Tamil cinema has also interacted with Tamil literature in some mutually enriching ways. Read more...
  • Flarf poetry was an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term Flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email listserv, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, invented by Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays and other texts. Pioneers of the movement include Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Mitch Highfill, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, Mel Nichols, Katie F-S, K. Silem Mohammad, Rod Smith, Gary Sullivan and others. Read more...
  • Porta a' Pinti English Cemetery, Florence, before 1827


    The Della Cruscans were a circle of European late-18th-century sentimental poets founded by Robert Merry (1755–98). Read more...
  • Arabic poetry (Arabic: الشعر العربي‎ ash-shi‘ru al-‘Arabīyyu) is the earliest form of Arabic literature. Present knowledge of poetry in Arabic dates from the 6th century, but oral poetry is believed to predate that.

    Arabic poetry is categorized into two main types, rhymed or measured, and prose, with the former greatly preceding the latter. The rhymed poetry falls within fifteen different meters collected and explained by al-Farahidi in The Science of ‘Arud. Al-Akhfash, a student of al-Farahidi, later added one more meter to make them sixteen. The meters of the rhythmical poetry are known in Arabic as "seas" (buḥūr). The measuring unit of seas is known as "taf‘īlah", and every sea contains a certain number of taf'ilas which the poet has to observe in every verse (bayt) of the poem. The measuring procedure of a poem is very rigorous. Sometimes adding or removing a consonant or a vowel can shift the bayt from one meter to another. Also, in rhymed poetry, every bayt has to end with the same rhyme (qāfiyah) throughout the poem. Read more...
  • Old Norse poetry encompasses a range of verse forms written in Old Norse, during the period from the 8th century (see Eggjum stone) to as late as the far end of the 13th century. Most of the Old Norse poetry that survives was preserved in Iceland, but there are also 122 preserved poems in Swedish rune inscriptions, 54 in Norwegian and 12 in Danish.

    Poetry played an important role in the social and religious world of the Vikings. In Norse mythology, Skáldskaparmál (1) tells the story of how Odin brought poetry to Asgard, which is an indicator of the significance of poetry within the contemporary Scandinavian culture. Read more...
  • The Generation of '98 (also called Generation of 1898 or (in Spanish) Generación del 98 or Generación de 1898) was a group of novelists, poets, essayists, and philosophers active in Spain at the time of the Spanish–American War (1898), committed to cultural and aesthetic renewal, and associated with modernism.

    The name Generación del 98 was coined by José Martínez Ruiz, commonly known as Azorín, in his 1913 essays titled "La generación de 1898", alluding to the moral, political and social crisis in Spain produced by the loss of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam after defeat in the Spanish–American War that same year. In his work Spain, 1808–1939, Raymond Carr defines the Generation of '98 as the "group of creative writers who were born in the seventies, whose major works fall in the two decades after 1898". Read more...
  • An initial from the first page of the Leys d'amor


    The Consistori del Gay Saber (Occitan: [kunsisˈtɔɾi ðel ˈɣaj saˈβe]; "Consistory of the Gay Science") was a poetic academy founded at Toulouse in 1323 to revive and perpetuate the lyric poetry of the troubadours.

    Also known as the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals ("Academy of the Floral Games"), it is the most ancient literary institution of the Western world. It was founded in 1323 in Toulouse and later restored by Clémence Isaure as the Consistori del Gay Saber with the goal of encouraging Occitan poetry. The best verses were given prizes at the floral games in the form of different flowers, made of gold or silver, such as violets, rose hips, marigolds, amaranths or lillies. The Consistori eventually became gallicised. It was renewed by Louis XIV in 1694 and still exists today. The Académie des Jeux Floraux has had such prestigious members as Ronsard, Marmontel, Chateaubriand, Voltaire, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Frédéric Mistral. Read more...
  • Latin American poetry is the poetry of Latin America, mostly but not entirely written in Spanish or Portuguese. The unification of Indigenous and imperial cultures produced a unique and extraordinary body of literature in this region. Later with the introduction of African slaves to the new world, African traditions greatly influenced Latin American poetry. Many great works of poetry were written in the colonial and pre-colonial time periods, but it was in the 1960s that the world began to notice the poetry of Latin America. Through the modernismo movement, and the international success of Latin American authors, poetry from this region became increasingly influential. Read more...
  • The traditional Albanian poetry includes folk Albanian poetry and songs that are part of Albanian culture. Read more...
  • The history of Gujarati literature (Gujarati: ગુજરાતી સાહિત્ય) may be traced to 1000 AD, and this literature has flourished since then to the present. It is unique in having almost no patronage from a ruling dynasty, other than its composers.

    Gujarat Vidhya Sabha, Gujarat Sahitya Sabha, Gujarat Sahitya Akademi and Gujarati Sahitya Parishad are Gujarat-based literary institutions promoting the Gujarati literature. Read more...
  • Grantwood was an artist's colony established in 1913 by Man Ray and Samuel Halpert and became the artistic center for a collective known as the "Others" group of artists. The colony consisted of a number of clapboard shacks on a bluff. Some names of the streets in this part of Ridgefield Heights — Sketch Place, Studio Road and Art Lane — pay homage to Grantwood's history. The first issue of The Glebe, a literary magazine, was published at the colony in 1913. In 1915, Alfred Kreymborg launched Others: A Magazine of the New Verse with Skipwith Cannell, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Along with works of the founders it published work of Maxwell Bodenheim, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, among others. Walter Conrad Arensberg was influential in supporting the colony. Read more...
  • The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry, Ford Madox Brown.

    This article focuses on poetry from the United Kingdom written in the English language. The article does not cover poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, including Southern Ireland after December 1922.

    The earliest surviving English poetry, written in Anglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century. Read more...
  • The "Graveyard Poets", also termed "Churchyard Poets", were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms" elicited by the presence of the graveyard. Moving beyond the elegy lamenting a single death, their purpose was rarely sensationalist. As the century progressed, "graveyard" poetry increasingly expressed a feeling for the "sublime" and uncanny, and an antiquarian interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. The "graveyard poets" are often recognized as precursors of the Gothic literary genre, as well as the Romantic movement. Read more...
  • Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition: International Dada Fair, Berlin, 5 June 1920. The central figure hanging from the ceiling was an effigy of a German officer with a pig's head. From left to right: Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (sitting), Otto Burchard, Johannes Baader, Wieland Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, Dr. Oz (Otto Schmalhausen), George Grosz and John Heartfield.

    Dada (/ˈdɑːdɑː/) or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (circa 1916); New York Dada began circa 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical far-left.
    There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife (letter-opener) at random into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a colloquial French term for a hobby horse. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism. Read more...
  • La Pléiade (French pronunciation: ​[la plejad]) is the name given to a group of 16th-century French Renaissance poets whose principal members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The name was a reference to another literary group, the original Alexandrian Pleiad of seven Alexandrian poets and tragedians (3rd century B.C.), corresponding to the seven stars of the Pleiades star cluster. The name "Pléiade" was also adopted in 1323 by a group of fourteen poets (seven men and seven women) in Toulouse. Read more...
  • Pushkin Reciting His Poem Before Old Derzhavin, a painting by Ilya Repin, 1911

    This is a list of authors who have written poetry in the Russian language.

    For the plain text list, see. Read more...
  • New Zealand poetry, like all poetry, is influenced by time and place and has been through a number of changes. Poetry has been part of New Zealand culture since before European settlement in the form of Māori sung poems or waiata. The first colonial non-Maori poetry was also predominantly sung poetry. Initially colonial poetry had a preoccupation with British themes. New Zealand poetry developed a strong local voice from the 1950s, and has now become a "polyphony" of traditionally marginalised voices. Read more...
  • Georgian Poetry refers to a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of British poetry that established itself during the early years of the reign of King George V of the United Kingdom.

    The Georgian poets were, by the strictest definition, those whose works appeared in a series of five anthologies named Georgian Poetry, published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh, the first volume of which contained poems written in 1911 and 1912. The group included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon and John Drinkwater. It was not until the final two volumes that the decision was taken to include female poets. Read more...
  • Dolce Stil Novo (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdoltʃe ˌstil ˈnɔːvo]; Italian for "sweet new style", modern Italian stile nuovo), or stilnovismo [stilnoˈvizmo], is the name given to the most important literary movement of the 13th century in Italy. Influenced by the Sicilian School and Tuscan poetry, its main theme is Love (Amore). Gentilezza (Noblemindedness) and Amore are indeed topoi in the major works of the period. The name Dolce Stil Novo was used for the first time by Dante Alighieri (Canto 24, Purgatorio). When he arrives in Purgatory he meets Bonagiunta Orbicciani, a 13th-century Italian poet, who tells Dante that Dante himself, Guido Guinizelli, and Guido Cavalcanti had been able to create a new genre: a stil novo. Precursors to the dolce stil novo are found in the Provençal works of the troubadours, such as the Genoese Lanfranc Cigala. The artists of the stil novo are called stilnovisti.

    Compared to its precursors, the poetry of the Dolce Stil Novo is regarded as superior in quality and more intelligent: it is a more refined poetry with regular use of metaphors and symbolism, as well as subtle double meanings. Poetry of this movement also often includes profound introspection. Many literary critics have argued that introspection in Italian literary works was first introduced by the Stil Novo poets, and later developed by Francesco Petrarca. Read more...
  • Assamese poetry is poetry in Assamese language. It borrows many themes from Sanskrit literature and is mainly devotional in tone. The origins of Assamese poetry are considered to have taken place in the early 13th century, the Bhagavat Purana is one of the most notable examples Read more...
  • The New Apocalyptics were a poetry grouping in the UK in the 1940s, taking their name from the anthology The New Apocalypse (1939), which was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

    Their reaction against the political realism of much Thirties poetry drew for support upon D. H. Lawrence (Apocalypse, 1931), surrealism, myth, and expressionism. Read more...
  • Modernist poetry refers to poetry written, mainly in Europe and North America, between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates. The critic/poet C. H. Sisson observed in his essay Poetry and Sincerity that "Modernity has been going on for a long time. Not within living memory has there ever been a day when young writers were not coming up, in a threat of iconoclasm." Read more...
  • The Generation of '27 (Spanish: Generación del 27) was an influential group of poets that arose in Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry. Their first formal meeting took place in Seville in 1927 to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Writers and intellectuals paid homage at the Ateneo de Sevilla, which retrospectively became the foundational act of the movement. Read more...
  • Edition of the Kokin Wakashū anthology of classic Japanese poetry with wood-carved cover, 18th century.


    Japanese poetry is poetry of or typical of Japan, or written, spoken, or chanted in the Japanese language, which includes Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese, and some poetry in Japan which was written in the Chinese language or ryūka from the Okinawa Islands: it is possible to make a more accurate distinction between Japanese poetry written in Japan or by Japanese people in other languages versus that written in the Japanese language by speaking of Japanese-language poetry. Much of the literary record of Japanese poetry begins when Japanese poets encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang dynasty (although the Chinese classic anthology of poetry, Shijing, was well known by the literati of Japan by the 6th century). Under the influence of the Chinese poets of this era Japanese began to compose poetry in Chinese kanshi); and, as part of this tradition, poetry in Japan tended to be intimately associated with pictorial painting, partly because of the influence of Chinese arts, and the tradition of the use of ink and brush for both writing and drawing. It took several hundred years to digest the foreign impact and make it an integral part of Japanese culture and to merge this kanshi poetry into a Japanese language literary tradition, and then later to develop the diversity of unique poetic forms of native poetry, such as waka, haikai, and other more Japanese poetic specialties. For example, in the Tale of Genji both kanshi and waka are frequently mentioned. The history of Japanese poetry goes from an early semi-historical/mythological phase, through the early Old Japanese literature inclusions, just before the Nara period, the Nara period itself (710 to 794), the Heian period (794 to 1185), the Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), and so on, up through the poetically important Edo period (1603 and 1867, also known as "Tokugawa") and modern times; however, the history of poetry often is different than socio-political history. Read more...
  • British poetry is the field of British literature encompassing poetry from anywhere in the British world (whether of the British Isles, the British Empire, or the United Kingdom). The term is rarely used, as almost all such poets are clearly identified with one of the various nations or regions within those areas.

    Types of poetry which might be considered British poetry include: Read more...

Selected poems

  • "Fire and Ice" is one of Robert Frost's most popular poems. It was published in December 1920 in Harper's Magazine and in 1923 in his Pulitzer Prize−winning book New Hampshire. It discusses the end of the world, likening the elemental force of fire with the emotion of desire, and ice with hate. It is one of Frost's best-known and most anthologized poems. Read more...
  • "Thinking" is a poem written by Walter D. Wintle, a poet who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. Little to nothing is known about any details of his life. "Thinking" is also known as "The Man Who Thinks He Can".

    In the 20th century, different versions of the poem have been published. To this date, it is unknown which version correctly represents the original version, but it is strongly believed that the version below, published at least as early as 1905 ("Unity" College Magazine), embodies the original and unaltered poem. The exact date of the first, original publication of "Thinking" is unknown. Read more...
  • A fine-line drawing of an urn. It is tall, with high scrolled handles. Around the middle is a frieze of figures, of which four can be seen. From left to right, a naked man with a helmet and sword, a dancing woman in a flowing garment, a robed woman carrying a spear and a naked man with a cloak hanging from his shoulder. The drawing is inscribed "By John Keats".
    Tracing of an engraving of the Sosibios vase by Keats


    "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15, issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts (see 1820 in poetry).

    The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which includes "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Keats was aware of other works on classical Greek art, and had first-hand exposure to the Elgin Marbles, all of which reinforced his belief that classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem. Read more...
  • "Lycidas" (/ˈlɪsɪdəs/) is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, friend of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed. While many of the other poems in the compilation are in Greek and Latin, "Lycidas" is one of the poems written in English. Milton republished the poem in 1645. Read more...
  • The Little Boy Lost illuminated drawing


    "The Little Boy Lost" is a simple lyric poem written by William Blake. This poem is part of a larger work entitled Songs of Innocence which was published in the year 1789. "The Little Boy Lost" is a prelude to "The Little Boy Found". Read more...
  • First page of only surviving manuscript, circa 14th century.

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English: Sir Gawayn and þe Grene Knyȝt) is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. It is one of the best known Arthurian stories, with its plot combining two types of folklore motifs, the beheading game and the exchange of winnings. Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel, it draws on Welsh, Irish, and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition. It is an important example of a chivalric romance, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest which tests his prowess, and it remains popular to this day in modern English renderings from J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, and others, as well as through film and stage adaptations.

    It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. In his struggles to keep his bargain, Gawain demonstrates chivalry and loyalty until his honour is called into question by a test involving Lady Bertilak, the lady of the Green Knight's castle. Read more...
  • Tintern Abbey and Courtyard.jpg

    Tintern Abbey (Welsh: Abaty Tyndyrn pronunciation) was founded by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow, on 9 May 1131. It is situated adjacent to the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye, which at this point forms the border between Monmouthshire in Wales and Gloucestershire in England. It was only the second Cistercian foundation in Britain (after Waverley Abbey), and the first in Wales. The abbey fell into ruin after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Its remains have been celebrated in poetry and painting from the 18th century onwards. In 1984 Cadw took over responsibility for the site. The site is visited by approximately 70,000 people every year. Read more...
  • A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman, published in 1896. After a slow beginning, it rapidly grew in popularity, particularly among young readers. Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance. Many parodies have also been written that satirise Housman's themes and stylistic characteristics. Read more...
  • The Great Fire of London, which took place on September 2, 1666, was one of the major events that affected England during Dryden's "year of miracles".

    Annus Mirabilis is a poem written by John Dryden published in 1667. It commemorated 1665–1666, the "year of miracles" of London. Despite the poem's name, the year had been one of great tragedy, including the Great Fire of London. The title was perhaps meant to suggest that the events of the year could have been worse. Dryden wrote the poem while at Charlton in Wiltshire, where he went to escape one of the great events of the year: the Great Plague of London. Read more...
  • Title page of "Kubla Khan" (1816)

    Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment /ˌkʊblə ˈkɑːn/ is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.

    Some of Coleridge's contemporaries denounced the poem and questioned his story of its origin. It was not until years later that critics began to openly admire the poem. Most modern critics now view Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's three great poems, along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry, and is one of the most frequently anthologized poems in the English language. A copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Library in London. Read more...
  • A woodcut from William Caxton's second edition of The Canterbury Tales printed in 1483

    The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's work. It was during these years that Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.

    After a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls, The Canterbury Tales is near-unanimously seen as Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church. Chaucer's use of such a wide range of classes and types of people was without precedent in English. Although the characters are fictional, they still offer a variety of insights into customs and practices of the time. Often, such insight leads to a variety of discussions and disagreements among people in the 14th century. For example, although various social classes are represented in these stories and all of the pilgrims are on a spiritual quest, it is apparent that they are more concerned with worldly things than spiritual. Structurally, the collection resembles Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372. Read more...
  • Original manuscript of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth", showing Sassoon's revisions

    "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is a well-known poem written in 1917 by Wilfred Owen. It incorporates the theme of the horror of war. Read more...
  • Fever is a poem by Suman Pokhrel. It was appeared in Global Poetry in 2015. Later, this poem has been appeared in other platforms, and the part of it has been quoted in different quotation sites.


    This poem is translated into French as "LA FIÈVRE", and is published in Poetic Prism, an international multilingual poetry anthology, in 2016. Read more...
  • "After Apple-Picking" is a poem by American poet Robert Frost. It was published in North of Boston, Frost's second poetry collection. The poem does not conform strictly to a particular form, though it's loosely iambic pentameter.

    The poem describes a pastoral scene of New England life in autumn, characteristic of Frost's early work. The narrator is recalling his day spent picking apples on a ladder as he falls asleep. Scholarly interpretation of the poem often focuses on themes of sleep, dreaming, and the somber conclusion to the piece, in which the narrator wonders if his oncoming sleep is a normal slumber, or a "long sleep." Read more...
  • The Old English poem Judith describes the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. It is found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XV), dated ca. 975–1025. The Old English poem is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in the Book of Judith, still present in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian Bibles. Most notably, Ælfric of Eynsham, late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer, composed a homily (in prose) of the tale. Read more...
  • The Jabberwock, as illustrated by John Tenniel

    "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-Glass Land.

    In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realizing that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape. Read more...
  • "Casabianca" is a poem by the English poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, first published in The Monthly Magazine, Vol 2, August 1826

    The poem starts: Read more...
  • "Kaddish" also known as "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)" is a poem by Beat writer Allen Ginsberg about his mother Naomi and her death on June 9, 1956. Read more...
  • Frontispiece to Milton. Milton's intention to "justify the ways of God to men" (from Paradise Lost) appears beneath his depiction by Blake.


    Milton is an epic poem by William Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who returns from Heaven and unites with Blake to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors, and to undergo a mystical journey to correct his own spiritual errors.

    Milton was Blake's longest published poem to date, and was printed in Blake's characteristic combination of etched text and illustration supplemented by watercolour. Read more...
  • East Coker is the second poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was started as a way for Eliot to get back into writing poetry and was modelled after Burnt Norton. It was finished during early 1940 and printed for the Easter edition of the 1940 New English Weekly. The title refers to a small community that was directly connected to Eliot's ancestry and was home to a church that was later to house Eliot's ashes.

    The poem discusses time and disorder within nature that is the result of humanity following only science and not the divine. Leaders are described as materialistic and unable to understand reality. The only way for mankind to find salvation is through pursuing the divine by looking inwards and realizing that humanity is interconnected. Only then can people understand the universe. Read more...
  • Front cover of the first American edition (1878)

    Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia."

    FitzGerald's work at first was unsuccessful commercially. But it was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. In 1872 FitzGerald had a third edition printed, which increased interest in the work in the United States of America. By the 1880s, the book was extremely well known throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam Clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".
    FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions, and it has inspired similar translation efforts in English and in many other languages. Read more...
  • Ozymandias The Examiner 1818.jpg

    "Ozymandias" (/ˌɒziˈmændiəs/ oz-ee-MAN-dee-əs) is the title of two poems published in 1818.

    English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) wrote a sonnet, first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner
    in London. It was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems (1819) and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826. "Ozymandias" is Shelley's most famous work and is frequently anthologised. Read more...
  • The Excursion: Being a portion of The Recluse, a poem is a long poem by Romantic poet William Wordsworth and was first published in 1814 (see 1814 in poetry). It was intended to be the second part of The Recluse, an unfinished larger work that was also meant to include The Prelude, Wordsworth's other long poem, which was eventually published posthumously. The exact dates of its composition are unknown, but the first manuscript is generally dated as either September 1806 or December 1809. Read more...
  • Cad Goddeu (Middle Welsh: Kat Godeu, English: The Battle of the Trees) is a medieval Welsh poem preserved in the 14th-century manuscript known as the Book of Taliesin. The poem refers to a traditional story in which the legendary enchanter Gwydion animates the trees of the forest to fight as his army. The poem is especially notable for its striking and enigmatic symbolism and the wide variety of interpretations this has occasioned. Read more...
  • "Limbo" is a poem by Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite.

    It describes the similarity between a limbo dance and the transportation of African slaves into the West Indies and America. Read more...
  • Beppo: A Venetian Story is a lengthy poem by Lord Byron, written in Venice in 1817. Beppo marks Byron's first attempt at writing using the Italian ottava rima metre, which emphasized satiric digression. It is the precursor to Byron's most famous and generally considered best poem, Don Juan. Read more...
  • "This Be The Verse" is a lyric poem in three verses of long measure with an alternating rhyme scheme, by the English poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985). It was written around April 1971, first published in the August 1971 issue of New Humanist, and appeared in the 1974 collection High Windows.

    It is one of Larkin's best-known poems; the opening lines ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad") are among his most frequently quoted. Larkin himself compared it with W. B. Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree" and said he expected to hear it recited in his honour by a thousand Girl Guides before he died. It is frequently parodied. Television viewers in the United Kingdom voted it one of the "Nation's Top 100 Poems". Read more...
  • Illustration for the poem "Lotta Svärd".

    Lotta Svärd - Swedish: svärd means a sword - is the fourth poem in the second part of Johan Ludvig Runeberg's epic poem The Tales of Ensign Stål from 1860.

    The Lotta Svärd poem is about a woman who manned a field kitchen during the Finnish War. The name was later used for several Lotta movements (women's auxiliary movements) in the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway). Read more...
  • Gerard van Honthorst, King David Playing the Harp, 1622

    The Book of Psalms (/sɑːmz/ or /sɔː(l)mz/ SAW(L)MZ; Hebrew: תְּהִלִּים‬, Tehillim, "praises"), commonly referred to simply as Psalms or "the Psalms", is the first book of the Ketuvim ("Writings"), the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and thus a book of the Christian Old Testament. The title is derived from the Greek translation, ψαλμοί, psalmoi, meaning "instrumental music" and, by extension, "the words accompanying the music". The book is an anthology of individual psalms, with 150 in the Jewish and Western Christian tradition and more in the Eastern Christian churches. Many are linked to the name of David, but his authorship is not accepted by modern scholars. Read more...
  • "Strange Meeting" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. It deals with the atrocities of World War I. The poem was written sometime in 1918 and was published in 1919 after Owen's death. The poem is narrated by a soldier who goes to the underworld to escape the hell of the battlefield and there he meets the enemy soldier he killed the day before.

    This poem has been described as one of Owen's "most haunting and complex war poems". Read more...
  • Is acher in gaíth in-nocht... is an anonymous 9th-century poem in Old Irish.

    The poem exists uniquely as a marginal entry in the Stiftsbibliothek MS 904 at the Abbey of St. Gallen in Switzerland, which is a copy of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, heavily glossed in Old Irish. It was most likely written in Ireland in the (mid-?) 9th century, when Viking attacks on Irish monasteries, schools and churches were a regular occurrence. Read more...
  • Edward Lear's illustration of the Owl and the Pussycat

    "The Owl and the Pussycat" is a nonsense poem by Edward Lear, first published during 1871 as part of his book Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. Lear wrote the poem for a three-year-old girl, Janet Symonds, the daughter of Lear's friend poet John Addington Symonds and his wife Catherine Symonds. The term "runcible", used for the phrase "runcible spoon", was invented for the poem. Read more...
  • The Book of Job (/dʒoʊb/; Hebrew: אִיוֹב Iyov) is a book in the Ketuvim ("Writings") section of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and the first poetic book in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Addressing the problem of theodicy – the vindication of the justice of God in the light of humanity's suffering – it is a rich theological work setting out a variety of perspectives. It has been widely praised for its literary qualities, with Alfred Lord Tennyson calling it "the greatest poem of ancient and modern times". Read more...
  • Cover of Mountain Interval, copyright page, and page containing the poem "The Road Not Taken", by Robert Frost

    "The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 as the first poem in the collection Mountain Interval. Among English speakers and especially in North America it is a comparatively famous poem. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, literal and perhaps also figurative, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and (like the road fork itself) potentially divergent. Read more...
  • "Porphyria's Lover" is a poem by Robert Browning which was first published as "Porphyria" in the January 1836 issue of Monthly Repository. Browning later republished it in Dramatic Lyrics (1842) paired with "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" under the title "Madhouse Cells". The poem did not receive its definitive title until 1863.

    "Porphyria's Lover" is Browning's first ever short dramatic monologue, and also the first of his poems to examine abnormal psychology. Although its initial publication passed nearly unnoticed and received little critical attention in the nineteenth century, the poem is now heavily anthologised and much studied. Read more...
  • Amor and Psyche, sculpted in marble during the late 18th century


    "Ode to Psyche" is a poem by John Keats written in spring 1819. The poem is the first of his 1819 odes, which include "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale". "Ode to Psyche" is an experiment in the ode genre, and Keats's attempt at an expanded version of the sonnet format that describes a dramatic scene. The poem serves as an important departure from Keats's early poems, which frequently describe an escape into the pleasant realms of one's imagination. Keats uses the imagination to show the narrator's intent to resurrect Psyche and reincarnate himself into Eros (love). Keats attempts this by dedicating an "untrodden region" of his mind to the worship of the neglected goddess. Read more...
  • "Cold Iron" is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling published as the introduction to Rewards and Fairies in 1910. Not to be confused with Cold Iron (The Tale).

    In 1983, Leslie Fish set the poem to music and recorded it as the title track on her fifth cassette-tape album. In 1996, the song was nominated for a Pegasus Award for "Best Spiritual Song" by a ballot of science fiction and fantasy fans, conducted by the committee of the annual Ohio Valley Filk Fest (OVFF), a filk music convention. Read more...
  • 1913 photograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn


    The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to be an intense and challenging read. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's content.

    The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition. Read more...
  • Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is an epic poem by American writer Herman Melville, originally published in two volumes. Clarel is the longest poem in American literature, stretching to almost 18,000 lines (longer even than European classics such as the Iliad, Aeneid and Paradise Lost). As well as for its great length, Clarel is notable for being the major work of Melville's later years. Read more...
  • "Fare Thee Well" is an 1816 poem by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, known as Lord Byron. Read more...
  • The Second Decade (Italian: Decennale secondo) is a poem by Italian Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli. Published in 1509, it is an update to Machiavelli's earlier work The First Decade (Decennale Primo), published in 1504. Read more...
  • Leonard reading "I want a president" at a My Barbarian performance at the New Museum.

    "I want a president" is a poem written by artist Zoe Leonard in 1992. Read more...
  • Groa's Incantation by W. G. Collingwood

    Grógaldr or The Spell of Gróa is the first of two poems, now commonly published under the title Svipdagsmál found in several 17th-century paper manuscripts with Fjölsvinnsmál. In at least three of these manuscripts, the poems are in reverse order and separated by a third eddic poem titled, Hyndluljóð. For a long time, the connection between the two poems was not realized, until in 1854 Svend Grundtvig pointed out a connection between the story told in Gróagaldr and the first part of the medieval Scandinavian ballad of Ungen Sveidal/Herr Svedendal/Hertig Silfverdal (TSB A 45, DgF 70, SMB 18, NMB 22). Then in 1856, Sophus Bugge noticed that the last part of the ballad corresponded to Fjölsvinnsmál. Bugge wrote about this connection in Forhandlinger i Videnskabs-Selskabet i Christiania 1860, calling the two poems together Svipdagsmál. Subsequent scholars have accepted this title.

    Gróagaldr is one of six eddic poems involving necromantic practice. It details Svipdag's raising of his mother Groa, a völva, from the dead. Before her death, she requested him to do so if he ever required her help; the prescience of the völva is illustrated in this respect. The purpose of this necromancy was that she could assist her son in a task set him by his cunning stepmother. Svipdag's mother, Gróa, has been identified as the same völva who chanted a piece of Hrungnir's hone from Thor's head after their duel, as detailed in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. There, Gróa is the wife of Aurvandil, a man Thor rescues from certain death on his way home from Jötunheim. The news of her husband's fate makes Gróa so happy, she forgets the charm, leaving the hone firmly lodged in Thor's forehead. Read more...

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12 February 2019 –
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden confirms the election of Finnish writer and poet Tua Forsström as a new member of the Swedish Academy, the body that formally decides the annual winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Swedish Academy)

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