1. Poem Written At Morning - written by Wallace Stevens
Read 10288 times on American Poems.

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The... (Read full poem)

He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and... (Read full poem)

3. November 6 - written by David Lehman
Read 2134 times on American Poems.

Remember when Khrushchev said
"We will bury you!"
on the cover
of Time
I thought he was
employing a metaphor
as in "Braves Scalp Giants!"
on the back page
of the Daily News
I pictured the Russians
burying us under a mound
of all the rubble
that... (Read full poem)

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my... (Read full poem)

5. Roger Heston - written by Edgar Lee Masters
Read 989 times on American Poems.

Oh many times did Ernest Hyde and I
Argue about the freedom of the will.
My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow
Roped out to grass, and free you know as far
As the length of the rope.
One day while arguing so, watching the cow
Pull at the... (Read full poem)

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it... (Read full poem)

7. Typhoon Signal No. 1 - written by Nick Carbo
Read 1218 times on American Poems.

This is where the typhoon starts—
inside the fourth paragraph,
ten city blocks away,

where the neurosurgeon halfs
La Celestina, where you occupy
the spot under that Tiffany lamp,

where Edgar Rice Burroughs laughs,
where sugar cane is... (Read full poem)

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience... (Read full poem)

9. The Poet - written by Delmore Schwartz
Published in 1954. Read 1666 times on American Poems.

The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry 
His power is his left hand
      It is idle weak and precious
His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him
   like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience 
And this... (Read full poem)

Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
about the woman, whom I taught, in bed,
this prayer? It starts with praise; the... (Read full poem)

11. The Touch - written by Anne Sexton
Read 6837 times on American Poems.

For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the... (Read full poem)

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
            dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled... (Read full poem)

13. "Gay" is the captivating cognomen - written by e.e. cummings
Read 51075 times on American Poems.

"Gay" is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge,
mass.
to whom nobody seems to have mentioned ye olde freudian wish;
when i contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass
you try if we are a gentleman not to think of(sh)

the... (Read full poem)

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat... (Read full poem)

15. To The Whore Who Took My Poems - written by Charles Bukowski
Read 26267 times on American Poems.

some say we should keep personal remorse from the 
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out... (Read full poem)

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
"Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants."(Read full poem)

17. Her -- "last Poems" - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 22344 times on American Poems.

Her -- "last Poems" --
Poets -- ended --
Silver -- perished -- with her Tongue --
Not on Record -- bubbled other,
Flute -- or Woman --
So divine --
Not unto its Summer -- Morning
Robin -- uttered Half the Tune --
Gushed too free for the Adoring... (Read full poem)

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie --
True Poems flee --(Read full poem)

19. As The Poems Go - written by Charles Bukowski
Read 11263 times on American Poems.

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line... (Read full poem)

(After Rilke)


Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!

Teacher was strict. We delighted in the... (Read full poem)

21. Judson Stoddard - written by Edgar Lee Masters
Read 8891 times on American Poems.

On a mountain top above the clouds
That streamed like a sea below me
I said that peak is the thought of Budda,
And that one is the prayer of Jesus,
And this one is the dream of Plato,
And that one there the song of Dante,
And this is Kant and... (Read full poem)

OF what I write from myself—As if that were not the resumé; 
Of Histories—As if such, however complete, were not less complete than the preceding
	poems; 
As if those shreds, the records of nations, could possibly be as lasting as... (Read full poem)

23. The Planet On The Table - written by Wallace Stevens
Read 6297 times on American Poems.

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of... (Read full poem)

The great poems of
our elders in many
tongues we struggled

to comprehend who
are now content with
mystery simple

and profound you
in the night your
breath your body

orbit of time and
the moment you
Phosphorus and

Hesper a dark... (Read full poem)

25. Indications, The. - written by Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass. Published in 1900. Read 4639 times on American Poems.

THE indications, and tally of time; 
Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs; 
Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts; 
What always indicates the poet, is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their
	words; 
The... (Read full poem)