1. Theme For English B - written by Langston Hughes
Read 48715 times on American Poems.

The instructor said,

    Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you--
    Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham,... (Read full poem)

My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks's fragile page!

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

I would have taken the... (Read full poem)

3. A Word dropped careless on a Page - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 1873 times on American Poems.

A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria --(Read full poem)

It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,

Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear

Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in... (Read full poem)

5. A New Poet - written by Linda Pastan
From Heroes In Disguise. Published in 1991. Read 938 times on American Poems.

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In... (Read full poem)

I was sixteen, and I had the most terrible dreams,
And specks before my eyes, and nervous weakness.
And I couldn't remember the books I read,
Like Frank Drummer who memorized page after page.
And my back was weak, and I worried and... (Read full poem)

7. Dippold the Optician - written by Edgar Lee Masters
Read 437 times on American Poems.

What do you see now? 
Globes of red, yellow, purple. 
Just a moment! And now? 
My father and mother and sisters. 
Yes! And now? 
Knights at arms, beautiful women, kind faces. 
Try this. 
A field of grain—a city. 
Very good! And now? 
A... (Read full poem)

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in... (Read full poem)

9. The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm - written by Wallace Stevens
Read 3013 times on American Poems.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader... (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)

11. Psalm IV - written by Allen Ginsberg
From Kaddish. Published in 1960. Read 4823 times on American Poems.

Now I'll record my secret vision, impossible sight of the face of God:
It was no dream, I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem
having masturbated for no love, and read half naked an open book of Blake
        on my lap
Lo & behold! I... (Read full poem)

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?

Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate... (Read full poem)

13. Many red devils ran from my heart - written by Stephen Crane
From The Black Riders & Other Lines. Published in 1905. Read 5149 times on American Poems.

Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.(Read full poem)

This, with a face
like a mashed blood orange
that suddenly

would get eyes
and look up and scream
War! War!

clutching her
thick, ragged coat
a piece of hat

broken shoes
War! War!
stumbling for dread

at the young men
who with their gun-butts
shove... (Read full poem)

15. There is no Frigate like a Book - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 8947 times on American Poems.

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry --
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll --
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.(Read full poem)

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)

17. The Riddle - written by Richard Wilbur
Read 948 times on American Poems.

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused His work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all His grammar,

I love Him that He did not in a rage
Once and forever rule... (Read full poem)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sat gossiping with Robert.
(She was really a raving beauty in her day.
With Mary Pickford curls in clouds and whirls.)
She was trying to think of something nice to say,
So she pointed to a page by her fellow star and... (Read full poem)

19. The Snowflake Which Is Now And Hence Forever - written by Archibald MacLeish
Read 1030 times on American Poems.

Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after generation
Turn with reverence to the page?

Birdseye scholar of the frozen fish,
What would he make of the sole, clean, clear
Leap of the salmon that has disappeared?

To be,... (Read full poem)

Roses, rooted warm in earth,
Bud in rhyme, another age;
Lilies know a ghostly birth
Strewn along a patterned page;
Golden lad and chimbley sweep
Die; and so their song shall keep.

Wind that in Arcadia starts
In and out a couplet plays;
And the... (Read full poem)

21. March 1 - written by David Lehman
Read 878 times on American Poems.

I could stare for hours
at her, the woman stepping
out of her bath, breasts
bare, towel around her waist,
before I knew she was you 
in that one-bedroom in 
the Village sunny and cold
that Friday we woke up 
slowly & our breakfast table
arranged... (Read full poem)

You said that I "was Great" -- one Day --
Then "Great" it be -- if that please Thee --
Or Small -- or any size at all --
Nay -- I'm the size suit Thee --

Tall -- like the Stag -- would that?
Or lower -- like the Wren --
Or other heights of Other... (Read full poem)

23. Haroun Al Raschid - written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
From Birds Of Passage. Read 745 times on American Poems.

One day, Haroun Al Raschid read
A book wherein the poet said:-- 

"Where are the kings, and where the rest
Of those who once the world possessed? 

"They're gone with all their pomp and show,
They're gone the way that thou shalt go.... (Read full poem)

We sail out of season into on oyster-gray wind,
over a terrible hardness.
Where Dickens crossed with mal de mer
in twenty weeks or twenty days
I cross toward him in five.
Wraped in robes--
not like Caesar but like liver with bacon--
I rest on the... (Read full poem)

25. Description - written by Mark Doty
Read 1145 times on American Poems.

My salt marsh
-mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out-

how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally
with their... (Read full poem)