You may know me as the haiku guy, always posting my original haiku or translations of classical Japanese haiku, but I do enjoy other forms of poetry.

And so today I thought we’d look into a handful of great poems that I enjoy and suggest you give a read. With one possible exception I’m not going to pick any hidden gems here, no, these are all well-known and popular. But there is a reason they are popular — they’re good. If you haven’t read them before, I recommend you do now.

Here are a few I keep coming back to.

“Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley

An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Let’s start with this one. Riley is well-known in Indiana, but outside of the State he is not nearly as famous as some other big-name poets, so this may be the one I alluded to above that isn’t quite as famous as the rest.

I grew up with this one. Both my grandparents had been forced to memorize it when they were in school, so they were always reciting it to me. Riley writes in dialect, so if you’re not from Indiana, it might feel cartoonish. But read it aloud — really aloud, with a front-porch storyteller’s cadence — and you’ll see why it stuck. It’s part horror story, part moral lesson, and wholly American in its rhythm and voice. It has a musicality that’s long gone from most modern poetry.

Read it here

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

There’s a reason this one is quoted so often—it distills an entire worldview into fourteen lines. The image of the broken statue in the desert, the arrogant inscription, the irony of time’s erasure… it never fails to move me. It’s not just about hubris; it’s about permanence, or the lack thereof. For all the talk of immortality through art, Shelley leaves us with sand. The final line — “The lone and level sands stretch far away” — might be the most quietly devastating in all of poetry.

Read it here

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!“
Quoth the Raven, ”Nevermore."

I first came across this on an episode of The Simpsons, of all places. That episode led me to the poem. To my young brain (I must have only been 8 or 9), the language and meaning were fairly incomprehensible. But wouldn’t you know it, my grandma had had to memorize this one as well (she had to perform it in front of her school) so she recited it to me. I loved the sound of it and that made me stick with it until I was older and understood better.

Poe’s genius wasn’t just in the atmosphere — though there’s plenty of that — it was in the obsessive rhythm and rhyme. Once you’ve heard it, it’s impossible to forget. “The Raven” isn’t subtle, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s a fever dream of grief and guilt, told in a voice that keeps pushing toward madness. The refrain “Nevermore” is both a taunt and a dirge, and by the end, you can’t tell whether the narrator is cursed or simply broken.

Read it here

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

If Poe takes us deep into the shadows, Wordsworth lifts us out. This is one of those poems that seems simple until you try to write something like it. The daffodils, the dancing breeze, the joy of solitude — it’s all deceptively gentle. What I love is the way memory works in this poem: the idea that joy, once felt, can be recalled again and again, almost like a stored resource. The closing line — “And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils” — is one of the best descriptions of happiness I’ve ever read.

Read it here

“The Ladder of St. Augustine” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All common things, each day’s events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.

This one is less famous than it should be. It’s a motivational poem, but not a sentimental one. Longfellow builds it like a sermon, each stanza another rung in the argument that effort — not luck, nor genius — is what elevates us. It’s full of aphorisms that ought to be clichés by now, except they’re too well written. “The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight…” I think of that one often when I’m dragging myself toward some long-term goal.

Read it here

“Prometheus” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I know no poorer creatures
Under the sun, than you, Gods!
You barely sustain your majesty
with sacrificial offerings
And exhalated prayers
And would wither, were
Not children and beggars
Hopeful fools.

This one is my favorite. There’s thunder in it. Goethe’s “Prometheus” isn’t the punished rebel of Greek myth or the sympathetic victim of Shelley’s Frankenstein. He’s a defiant creator, spitting back at the gods, carving meaning from the mud with his own hands. “Here I sit, forming men / In my image…” The audacity of that line still jolts me. It’s the poem that made me feel like art could be an act of rebellion, not just reflection. It’s furious, proud, human — and strangely tender underneath all the fire. In Germany, Goethe is as famous as Shakespeare is in the English-speaking world. This poem shows you why. It’s so powerful and raw, I’d almost call it the greatest poem of all time.

Read it here (Not the same translation I quote from above, but still a good one)

That’s the list—for now. There are others, of course. But these six are amazing. Go give them a read and see what you think.

Any others on your list?

❦

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