Here are 200 of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the English language collected and arranged especially for Kindle readers. The design of this anthology is inspired by the structure of a sonnet, with 14 Poems for 14 Themes:
Love; Parting and Sorrow; Inspiration; Mystery and Enigma; Humour and Curiosities; Rapture; A Door Opens, A Door Closes; Memory; Tales and Songs; Nature; Cities; Solitude; Contemplation; and Animals. There are poems for every mood and occasion, and alongside the more famous works, are some lesser known gems of English poetry.
Included are masterpieces by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Christina Rossetti, and many other outstanding poets. Please see the contents panel on the right for a full listing.
At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful e-books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between the poems. We regularly update the formatting of our books, to ensure they will always remain perfectly accessible on all e-reader models.
This book is part of the Best of Poetry series, which also includes:
The Best of Poetry: Shakespeare, Muse of Fire
The Best of Poetry: In the Blue and Silver Night
The Best of Poetry: A Young Person’s Book of Evergreen Verse
Foreword
Anthologies of English verse are as abundant as mushrooms after rain. So why create another?
Our defence amounts to this: the kind of anthology that we wanted to own did not exist.
Our aim has been to compile an intricately structured anthology of classic English verse, in which the poems are arranged so as to strike fire off one another, and thereby bring new light to familiar lines.
We wanted there to be a sense of inevitably in the structure of the anthology, as well as in the placement of the poems within it. This book is organised as a sort of sonnet sequence, with fourteen poems for fourteen themes. A two-poem prologue and epilogue bring the collection to exactly 200 poems. In selecting which poems to include, we have tried to present the best-loved poems in the English language alongside some less commonly anthologized masterpieces.
Each theme in this anthology is introduced by two or three short meditations on the nature of poetry. Taken together, these pensées give some idea of the beauty, enchantment, and richness that poetry can offer. But it is in the poems themselves that the real treasure is to be found. We hope you will enjoy reading them.
The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn
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If you have any questions, you can contact us at admin@elsinorebooks.co.uk and we'll be with you right away to help.Prologue
To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence — James Elroy Flecker
There Is No Frigate Like a Book — Emily Dickinson
Part 1: Rapture: Words that Burn
Darest Thou Now O Soul — Walt Whitman
As Kingfishers Catch Fire — Gerard Manley Hopkins
From In Memoriam A.H.H. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Auguries of Innocence — William Blake
To a Skylark — Percy Bysshe Shelley
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer — John Keats
The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats
Ode to the West Wind — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Heaven — George Herbert
The Darkling Thrush — Thomas Hardy
First Fig — Edna St. Vincent Millay
God’s Grandeur — Gerard Manley Hopkins
The World-Soul — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ode to a Nightingale — John Keats
Part 2: A Door Opens; A Door Closes
Talisman — Marianne Moore
Green — D. H. Lawrence
Chinese Poet Among Barbarians — John Gould Fletcher
Cargoes — John Masefield
Selections from Epitaphs to the War 1914–1918 — Rudyard Kipling
Night, and I Travelling — Joseph Campbell
Moonlit Apples — John Drinkwater
The Coming of Good Luck — Robert Herrick
Like the Touch of Rain — Edward Thomas
Western Wind — Anonymous
Taking Leave of a Friend — Li Bai
The Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock — Wallace Stevens
The Embankment — T. E. Hulme
Cock-Crow — Edward Thomas
Part 3: Love
Wild Nights! Wild Nights! — Emily Dickinson
Sonnet 29: When, in Disgrace with Fortune — William Shakespeare
Donal Og — Anonymous
The Sun Rising — John Donne
A Drinking Song — W. B. Yeats
“Song” From Calisto — John Crowne
The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò — Edward Lear
To Celia — Ben Jonson
Imitated from Catullus: To Ellen — George Gordon, Lord Byron
The Farmer’s Bride — Charlotte Mew
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms — Thomas Moore
My Love Is Like to Ice — Edmund Spenser
She Comes Not When Noon Is on the Roses — Herbert Trench
Sonnets from the Portuguese: XLIII — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Part 4: Humour and Curiosities
The Little Dog’s Day — Rupert Brooke
From Through the Looking Glass — Lewis Carroll
The Height of the Ridiculous — Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Jabberwocky — Lewis Carroll
The Jumblies — Edward Lear
The Dong with a Luminous Nose — Edward Lear
Drinking — Abraham Cowley
The Litany for Donerail — Patrick O’Kelly
The Hunting of the Snark — Lewis Carroll
The Walrus and the Carpenter — Lewis Carroll
The Pobble Who Has No Toes — Edward Lear
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat — Edward Lear
The Mad Gardener’s Song — Lewis Carroll
The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-Tongs — Edward Lear
Part 5: Memory
When You Are Old — W. B. Yeats
Time Does Not Bring Relief — Edna St. Vincent Millay
Memory — Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Oft, in the Stilly Night — Thomas Moore
The Self-Unseeing — Thomas Hardy
Mnemosyne — Trumbull Stickney
From Intimations of Immortality — William Wordsworth
Piano — D. H. Lawrence
Miners — Wilfred Owen
From In Memoriam A.H.H. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Memory — Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Heraclitus — William Johnson Cory
Sonnet 30: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought — William Shakespeare
Into My Heart an Air That Kills — A. E. Housman
Part 6: Nature
O sweet spontaneous — E. E. Cummings
The Tables Turned — William Wordsworth
Birches — Robert Frost
Inversnaid — Gerard Manley Hopkins
From The Prelude (Book Six) — William Wordsworth
Mending Wall — Robert Frost
Song of Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson
On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees — Adelaide Crapsey
The World Is Too Much with Us — William Wordsworth
Puritan Sonnet — Elinor Wylie
Spring — Gerard Manley Hopkins
Summer — Anonymous
Autumn — John Clare
Winter — Robert Louis Stevenson
Part 7: Tales and Songs
The Pied Piper of Hamelin — Robert Browning
Riding Together — William Morris
The Prisoner of Chillon — George Gordon, Lord Byron
Miniver Cheevy — Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens — Anonymous
The Ballad of Reading Gaol — Oscar Wilde
Lord Randal — Anonymous
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Witch — Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
La Belle Dame sans Merci — John Keats
Lochinvar — Sir Walter Scott
Richard Cory — Edwin Arlington Robinson
Annabel Lee — Edgar Allan Poe
The Skeleton in Armor — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Part 8: Solitude
I Am — John Clare
The Day is Done — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
To Marguerite — Matthew Arnold
Bright Star — John Keats
Fragment — Sappho
The Daffodils — William Wordsworth
Alone — Crosbie Garstin
The Snow Man — Wallace Stevens
Rain — Edward Thomas
The Soul Selects Her Own Society — Emily Dickinson
Ulysses — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Lake Isle of Innisfree — W. B. Yeats
On His Blindness — John Milton
Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex — Charlotte Smith
Part 9: Contemplation
How Happy is the Little Stone — Emily Dickinson
From An Essay on Man: Epistle II — Alexander Pope
Poetry — Marianne Moore
Dirge in Woods — George Meredith
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey — William Wordsworth
The Indian upon God — W. B. Yeats
“Morning Song” From Senlin — Conrad Aiken
Dialogue Between a Stethoscopist and an Unborn Child — James Henry
Elegy for Himself — Chidiock Tichborne
From Rubaiyat — Omar Khayyám
When I Heard the Learned Astronomer — Walt Whitman
Terminus — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Last Lesson of the Afternoon — D. H. Lawrence
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard — Thomas Gray
Part 10: Mystery and Enigma
The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Meeting at Night — Robert Browning
I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon — Stephen Crane
The Man of Double Deed — Anonymous
The Emperor of Ice Cream — Wallace Stevens
The Song of Wandering Aengus — W. B. Yeats
Porphyria’s Lover — Robert Browning
The Raven — Edgar Allan Poe
The Villain — W. H. Davies
Kubla Khan — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ozymandias — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Unwelcome — Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
My Last Duchess — Robert Browning
Anecdote of the Jar — Wallace Stevens
Part 11: Parting and Sorrow
Crossing the Bar — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Deaths Stands Above Me — Walter Savage Landor
Song — Christina Rossetti
From Song of Myself — Walt Whitman
Epitaph — Catherine Dyer
Finis — E. E. Cummings
On My First Son — Ben Jonson
The Wild Swans at Coole — W. B. Yeats
Sidera Cadentia — Ford Madox Ford
From In Memoriam A.H.H. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Drummer Hodge — Thomas Hardy
Requiem — Robert Louis Stevenson
From Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Remember — Christina Rossetti
Part 12: Animals
Epitaph to a Dog — George Gordon, Lord Byron
The Fish — Marianne Moore
The Fly — William Blake
To a Mouse — Robert Burns
Wagtail and Baby — Thomas Hardy
Haiku — Basho
The Donkey — G. K. Chesterton
A Noiseless Patient Spider — Walt Whitman
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat — Thomas Gray
The Flea — John Donne
The Windhover — Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Tyger — William Blake
A Crocodile — Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Man’s Universal Hymn — James Henry
Part 13: Inspiration
The Builders — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Invictus — W. E. Henley
O Me! O Life! — Walt Whitman
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking — Emily Dickinson
The Leaden-Eyed — Vachel Lindsay
From The Masque of Anarchy — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth — Arthur Hugh Clough
Happy the Man — Horace
The Last Word — Matthew Arnold
The Pool — William Soutar
If — Rudyard Kipling
The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost
An Epilogue — John Masefield
From A Song of Joys — Walt Whitman
Part 14: Cities
Chicago — Carl Sandburg
The New Colossus — Emma Lazarus
A London Thoroughfare 2 A.M. — Amy Lowell
A Nocturnal Sketch — Thomas Hood
London Snow — Robert Bridges
A Brook in the City — Robert Frost
London — William Blake
In a Station of the Metro — Ezra Pound
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry — Walt Whitman
A Description of a City Shower — Jonathan Swift
The Great Figure — William Carlos Williams
The Crowded Street — William Cullen Bryant
Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge — William Wordsworth
The Great City — Walt Whitman
Epilogue
A Clear Midnight — Walt Whitman
Epigram — Henry David Thoreau