American Poetry: An Essential Reading List
So, you want to bone up on your classic American poetry but don’t know where to start? Wonder no more! Here is a list of the essential works of some of America’s finest poets. The list is organized chronologically by the birth date of the author, and the works range from single-verse poems to epic odes.
Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672)
“Upon the Burning of Our House by Night When Others Soundly Slept”
“Contemplations”
“A Dialogue Between Old England and New”
“The Flesh and the Spirit”
“The Four Ages of Man”
Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784)
“Liberty and Peace, A Poem”
“A Farewell to America To Mrs. S. W.”
“A Rebus, by Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E. An Infant of Twelve Months”
“Ode to Neptune”
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”
“On Imagination”
“On Recollection”
“On Virtue”
William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
“To a Waterfowl”
“The Death of Lincoln”
“An Indian at the Burial Place of His Fathers”
“The Death of Slavery”
“To an American Painter Departing for Europe”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The American Scholar”
“Self-Reliance”
“Nature”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“The Song of Hiawatha”
“Evangeline&rdquo#8221
“Paul Revere’s Ride”
“The Courtship of Miles Standish”
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“The Witch of Wenham”
“The Farewell: Of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage”
“Barbara Frietchie”
“The Pumpkin”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The Raven”
“The Bells”
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)
“The Chambered Nautilus”
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I Sing the Body Electric”
“Cavalry Crossing a Ford”
“A Noiseless Patient Spider”
“O Captain! My Captain!”
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“’Tis little I could care for pearls”
“Hope is a subtle glutton”
“I’ll tell you how the sun rose”
“Forbidden fruit a flavor has”
“My life closed twice before its close”
“A narrow fellow in the grass”
“The brain is wider than the sky”
“The mountain sat upon the plain”
“Heart, we will forget him!”
“The bat is dun with wrinkled wings”
“Of bronze and blaze”
“Death is like the insect”
“So Proud she was to die”
“I heard a fly buzz when I died”
Amy Lowell (1874–1925)
“Before the Altar”
“Azure and Gold”
“Venetian Glass”
“Fatigue”
“Roads”
“Teatro Bambino”
“Frankincense and Myrrh”
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Stars”
“Mending Wall”
“The Death of the Hired Man”
“Home Burial”
“The Wood-pile”
“The Road Not Taken”
“Birches”
“Fire and Ice”
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)
“The Flower-Fed Buffaloes”
“Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”
“The Leaden-Eyed”
“The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith’s Son”
“The Congo”
“General William Booth Enters into Heaven”
Wallace Stevens (1878–1955)
“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”
“The Snow Man”
“Sunday Morning”
“The Emperor of Ice Cream”
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
“Anecdote of the Jar”
“The Idea of Order at Key West”
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
“Prairie Waters by Night”
“Adelaide Crapsey”
“Portrait of a Motor Car”
“Leather Leggings”
“Always the Mob”
“Near Keokuk”
“In Tall Grass”
“Chicago”
“Mill-Doors”
“Skyscraper”
“Murmurings in a Field Hospital”
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“Berket and the Stars”
“April”
“This Is Just to Say”
“Spring and All”
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
“A Sort of Song”
“The Use of Force”
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
“The Long Hill”
“Barter”
“Peace”
“Dooryard Roses”
“Water Lilies”
“Night Wind at Amalfi”
Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“In a Station of the Metro”
“Sestina: Altaforte”
“Ballad of the Goodley Fere”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“Renascence”
“Tavern”
“Ashes of Life”
“Sorrowful Dreams”
“Once More into My Arid Days”
“Night Is My Sister”
“The Cameo”
“Bluebeard”
e. e. cummings (1894–1962)
“anyone lived in a pretty how town”
“Buffalo Bill’s”
“in Just-”
“maggie and millie and molly and may”
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”
“Spring is like a perhaps hand”
“what if a much of a which of a wind”
“the Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls”
“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”
“why must itself up every of a park”
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
“The Weary Blues”
“Harlem”
“Song for a Dark Girl”
Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“The Sniffle”
“A Watched Example Never Boils”
“The Clean Platter”
“The Party”
“A Lady Thinks She Is Thirty”
“Riding on a Railroad Train”
“Shorts”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
“This Lunar Beauty”
“As I Walked Out One Evening”
“Musée des Beaux Arts”
“The Unknown Citizen”
“In Praise of Limestone”
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“Elegy for Jane”
“I Knew a Woman”
“My Papa’s Waltz”
“In a Dark Time”
“The Waking”
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“Filling Station”
“The Bight”
“Lullaby for the Cat”
“The Shampoo”
“In the Waiting Room”
“One Art”
“The Moose”
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000)
“The Bean Eaters”
“We Real Cool”
“Sadie and Maud”
“Kitchenette Building”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919– )
“Pictures of the Gone World”
“A Coney Island of the Mind”
“Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt”
“Sometime During Eternity”
“Baseball Canto”
“Dog”
Howard Nemerov (1920–1991)
“Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry”
“Definition”
“Trees”
“Learning by Doing”
“The Great Gull”
Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
“The Secret”
“Variation and Reflection on a Theme by Rilke”
“The Ache of Marriage”
“People at Night”
“Remembering”
Alan Ginsberg (1926–1997)
“Howl”
“Kaddish”
“Sunflower Sutra”
James Merrill (1926–1995)
“Lost in Translation”
“The Changing Light at Sandover”
W. D. Snodgrass (1926– )
“April Inventory”
“Heart’s Needle”
John Ashbery (1927– )
“Some Trees”
“Faust”
“Forties Flick”
“For John Clare”
James Wright (1927–1980)
“Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”
“Beginning”
W. S. Merwin (1927– )
“Yesterday”
“My Friends”
“Beggars and Kings”
“For the Anniversary of My Death”
“Some Last Questions”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Her Kind”
“My Friend, My Friend”
Maya Angelou (1928– )
“Phenomenal Women”
“Still I Rise”
Philip Levine (1928– )
“Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”
“They Feed They Lion”
“Salts and Oils”
“Gin”
“What Work Is”
Adrienne Rich (1929– )
“Miracle Ice Cream”
“In Those Years”
“For the Dead”
“From a Survivor”
“From Two Songs”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“Daddy”
“Two Sisters of Persephone”
“Lady Lazarus”
“Metaphors”
“Mad Girl’s Love Song”
“Mushrooms”
“The Colossus”
“Paralytic”
“Virgin in a Tree”
Charles Simic (1938– )
“The Wooden Toy”
“Everything’s Forseeable”
“Against Winter”
“In the Fourth Year”
“He Held the Beast”
“I Was Stolen”
“Miracle Glass Co.”
Louise Glück (1943– )
“The Silver Lily”
“Circe’s Power”
“Confession”
“Celestial Music”
James Tate (1943– )
“More Later, Less the Same”
“The Wrong Way Home”
“Happy As the Day Is Long”
“The Definition of Gardening”
“The New Ergonomics”
“Days of Pie and Coffee”
“Restless Leg Syndrome”
This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg! Be sure to also check out our Quick Guide American Literature: An Essential Reading List. Happy reading!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to English Literature by Jay Stevenson, Ph.D.
