The New Oxford Book of American Verse

Online version:

The prologue ; The flesh and the spirit ; The author to her book ; Before the birth of one of her children ; To my dear and loving husband ; Some verses upon the burning of our house July 10th, 1666 / Anne Bradstreet

Meditation 8 ; Meditation 9 ; Meditation 10 ; Meditation 29 ;Meditation 62 / Philip Pain

8. Meditation. Joh. 6.51. I am the living bread ; 38. Meditation. 1 Joh. 2.1. An advocate with the father ; 112. Meditation. 2 Cor. 5.14. If one died for all then are all dead ; The preface [to God's Determinations] ; Upon a spider catching a fly ; Huswifery ; Let by rain ; Upon a wasp child with cold / Edward Taylor

George the Third's soliloquy ; The wild honey suckle ; To an author ; The Indian burying ground / Philip Freneau

On being brought from Africa to America / Phillis Wheatley

The Hasty-Pudding: Canto I ; Advice to a raven in Russia / Joel Barlow

Thanatopsis ; To a waterfowl ; Green River ; The prairies / William Cullen Bryant

Each and all /; The problem ; The visit ;r Uriel ; The sphinx ; Alphonso of Castile ; Mithridates ; Guy ; Hamatreya ; The rhodora ; The humble-bee ; The snow-storm ; Woodnotes I ; Woodnotes II ; Ode, inscribed to W.H. Channing ; Give all to love ; Thine eyes still shined ; Merlin I ; Merlin II ; Bacchus ; Xenophanes ; Blight ; Concord hymn ; Brahma ; Nemesis ; Two Rivers ; Waldeinsamkeit ; Terminus ; Compensation ; Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan ; Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hymn to the night ; The day is done ; The fire of drift-wood ; from The Song of Hiawatha: introduction ; The Jewish Cemetery at Newport ; My lost youth ; Snow-flakes ; Aftermath ; Chaucer ; The tide rises, the tide falls ; The cross of snow / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ichabod ; To my old schoolmaster ; Skipper Ireson's ride ; Telling the bees ; My playmate ; Barbara Frietchie ; Snow-bound ; What the birds said ; My triumph ; The lost occasion / John Greenleaf Whittier

The deacon's masterpiece ; The chambered nautilus ; Dorothy Q. / Oliver Wendell Holmes A dream within a dream ; Song from Al Aaraaf ; Introduction [to Poems, 1831] ; To Helen ; Israfel ; The city in the sea ; The sleeper ; The haunted palace ; The Coliseum ; Sonnet-Silence ; The conqueror worm ; Dream-land ; The raven ; Ulalume-A ballad ; Eldorado ; For Annie ; Annabel Lee / Edgar Allan Poe

The columbine ; The new birth; The dead ; The grave-yard ; Thy brother's blood ; The new man; The clouded morning ; The trees of life ; I was sick and in prison ; Yourself ; The lost ; The fair morning ; The day of denial ; The lament of the flowers ; The sumach leaves / Jones Very

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied ; Light-winged smoke, Icarian bird ; Inspiration ; Within the circuit of this plodding life ; The river swelleth more and more ; Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf / Henry David Thoreau

The Battle Hymn of the Republic / Julia Ward Howe

from A fable for critics ; Emerson ; Bryant ; Whittier ; Hawthorne ; Cooper ; Poe and Longfellow ; Holmes ; Lowell ; from The biglow Papers: the courtin' ; Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration / James Russell Lowell

Come, said my soul ; Song of myself ; A woman waits for me ; Song of the open road ; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ; On the beach at night ; Me imperturbe ; From pent-up aching rivers ; In paths untrodden ; I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing ; Out of the cradle endlessly rocking ; As I ebb'd with the ocean of life ; Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice ; O living always, always dying ; Shut not your doors ; Vigil strange I kept on the field one night ; The wound-dresser ; Give me the splendid silent sun ; When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd ; One's self I sing ; To a stranger ; Aboard at a ship's helm ; A noiseless patient spider / Walt Whitman

The portent ; Misgivings ; The conflict of convictions ; Shiloh ; The house-top ; The maldive shark ; To Ned ; The berg ; The ravaged villa ; Art ; Fragments of a lost gnostic poem of the 12th century ; The attic landscape ; The return of the Sire de Nesle ; The blue-bird ; Pontoosuce ; Billy in the Darbies / Herman Melville An upper chamber in a darkened house ; Still pressing through these weeping solitudes ; And change with hurried hand has swept these scenes ; Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips ; Here, where the red man swept the leaves away ; Hast thou seen reversed the prophet's miracle ; November ; Under the Locust blossoms ; The cricket / Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Charleston ; Ethnogenesis ; Ode / Henry Timrod

I never lost as much but twice ; Success is counted sweetest ; "Arcturus" is his other name ;; never hear the word "escape" / Our lives are Swiss ; Just lost, when I was saved ; Ah, Necromancy Sweet ; "Faith" is a fine invention ; I taste a liquor never brewed ; Safe in their Alabaster Chambers ; Wild nights- wild nights ; I can wade grief ; "Hope" is the thing with feathers ; There's a certain slant of light ; I felt a funeral, in my brain ; I'm Nobody! Who are you? ; The soul selects her own society ; There came a day at summer's full ; A bird came down the walk ; After great pain, a normal feeling comes ; Did our best moment last ; Much madness is divinest sense ; This is my letter to the world ; This was a poet- it is that ; I died for beauty- but was scarce ; I heard a fly buzz- when I died ; I am alive- I guess ; I would not paint- a picture ; It was not Death, for I stood up ; If you were coming in the fall ; The heart asks pleasure- first ; I've seen a dying eye ; The brain, within it's groove ; I like to see it lap the miles ; There is a pain- so utter ; I years had been from home ; They shut me up in prose ; I asked no other thing ; I cannot live with you ; I dwell in possibility ; Because I could not stop for death ; Drama's vitallest expression is the common day ; Remorse- is memory- awake ; A light exists in spring ; Finding is the first act ; I stepped from plank to plank ; We outgrow love, like other things ; I felt a cleaving in my mind ; A narrow fellow in the grass ; Crumbling is not an instant's act ; Satisfaction- is the agent ; Reportless subjects, to the quick ; Further in summer than the birds ; Perception of an object costs ; Title divine- is mine ; Tell al the truth but tell it slant ; So proud she was to die ; Until the desert knows ; A bee his burnished carriage ; As imperceptibly as grif ; There came a wind like a bugle ; There are to Mays ; The pedigree of honey ; In winter in my room ; God is indeed a jealous God ; My life closed twice before its close ; Softened by time's consummate plush ; That it will never come again ; That love is all there is ; Too happy time dissolves itself / Emily Dickinson Go down Moses ; Frankie and Johnny ; Take a whiff on me ; The Big Rock Candy Mountains ; De Ballit of de voll weevil ; John Henry ; Joshua fit de Battle ob Jerico / Folk songs and ballads From the flats ; The marshes of Glynn ; Marsh song- at sunset ; A ballad of trees and the master ; That's more in the man than thar is in the land / Sidney Lanier

The hill ; Petit, the poet ; Editor Whedon ; Anne Rutledge ; Lucinda Matlock / Edgar Lee Masters

Gloucester Moors ; On a soldier fallen in the Philippines / William Vaughan Moody

Luke Havergal ; Richard Cory ; Reuben Bright ; George Crabbe ; How Annadale went out ; Miniver Cheevy ; For a dead lady ; Eros Turannos ; Veteran sirens ; Mr. Flood's party ; The sheaves ; Why he was there ; New England ; Reunion / Edwin Arlington Robinson

In the desert ; I saw a man pursuing the horizon ; Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind / Stephen Crane

In the past ; Mnemosyne / Trumbull Stickney

The pasture ; Mowing ; Reluctance ; Mending wall ; After apple-picking ; The oven bird ; Two witches: the Witch of Coos ; Fire and ice ; Nothing gold can stay ; Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ; For once, then, something ; To earthward ; The lockless door ; The need of being versed in country things ; Spring pools ; Once by the Pacific ; Acquainted with the night ; The lovely shall be choosers ; West-running brook ; A drumlin woodchuck ; Departmental ; Desert places ; Leaves compared with flowers ; Neither out far nor in deep ; Design ; Provide, provide ; The silken tent ; Come in ; The subverted flower ; The gift outright ; Directive ; The middleness of the road ; Away! / Robert Frost. Chicago ; Gone ; Cool tombs ; Grass ; Gargoyle ; They all want to play Hamlet ; Soup ; Aprons of silence ; Four preludes on playthings of the wind ; from The people, Yes / Carl Sandburg

General William Booth enters into heaven ; The eagle that is forgotten ; The Congo ; Abraham Lincoln walks at midnight ; The flower-fed buffaloes / Vachel Lindsay

Peter Quince at the Clavier ; Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird ; Sunday morning ; A high-toned old Christian woman ; The emperor of ice-cream ; Bantams in pine-woods ; Anecdote of the jar ; Dance of the macabre mice ; The idea of order at Key West ; Dry loaf ; The sense of the sleight-of-hand man ; from Notes toward a supreme fiction ; from Esthétique du mal ; So-and-so reclining on her couch ; Men made out of words ; A primitive like an orb ; The river of rivers in Connecticut ; The Irish cliffs of Moher ; To an old philosopher in Rome / Wallace Stevens

Tract ; Danse Russe ; Queen-Ann's-Lace ; The widow's lament in springtime ; Spring and all ; The red wheelbarrow ; To Elsie ; At the ball game ; To Mark Anthony in heaven ; Portrait of a lady ; This is just to say ; The yachts ; The Catholic bells ; These ; The dance ; Burning the Christmas greens ; To Ford Madox Ford in heaven ; The rose ; The semblables ; from Paterson: Book I ; Ol' Bunk's Band ; Lear ; A unison ; The horse show ; Coda ; At Kenneth Burke's place / William Carlos Williams Sestina: Altaforte ; Portrait d'une Femme ; A Virginal ; The return ; An immorality ; The River-Merchant's wife: a letter ; The Jewel Stairs' grievance ; Salutation ; Salutation The Second ; A pact ; The rest ; The study in aesthetics ; Coda In a station of the Metro ; Ancient wisdom, rather cosmic ; The temperaments ; From Homage to Sextus Propertius ; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ; Monumentum Aere, etc. ; Canto II ; Canto VII ; Canto XLV ; Canto LXXXI / Ezra Pound Pear tree ; Oread ; At Baia ; Helen ; Stars Wheel in purple ; The mysteries remain ; From Tribute to the angels ; From The Flowering of the rod ; From Good Frend ; From Helen in Egypt / H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) To the Stone-cutters ; Night ; Phenomena ; Shine, perishing Republic ; Fawn's foster-mother ; Hurt hawks ; Apology for bad dreams ; Shane O'Neill's cairn ; Antrim ; Rock and hawk ; Ave Caesar ; The Purse-Seine ; The beaks of eagles ; Shiva ; Watch the lights fade ; The eye ; But I am growing old and indolent ; Vulture / Robinson Jeffers Poetry ; Critics and connoisseurs ; A grave ; Marriage ; Silence ; The Steeple-Jack ; The hero ; The monkeys ; The Pangolin ; What are years? ; Spenser's Ireland ; Enough ; In the public garden / Marianne Moore Bells for John Whieside's daughter ; Judith of Bethulia ; Winter remembered ; Captain Carpenter ; Philomela ; Old mansion ; Piazza Piece ; Vision by Sweetwater ; The Equilibrists ; Painted head / John Crowe Ransom The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock ; Gerontion ; Whispers of Immortality ; Sweeney among the nightingales ; The waste land ; From Ash-Wednesday ; Little Gidding / T.S. Eliot From Discordants ; From Priapus and the pool ; The room ; Hatteras calling ; Dear Uncle Stranger ; The accomplices ; Herman Melville / Conrad Aiken L'An trentiesme de mon eage ; The end of the world ; Ars Poetica ; You, Andrew Marvell ; Epistle to be left in the earth ; Lines for an interment ; Brave new world ; Ezry / Archibald Macleish when god lets my body be ; Buffalo Bill's ; the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls ; nobody loses all the time ; she being Brand ; a man who had fallen among thieves ; if i have made, my lady, intricate ; i sing of Olaf glad and big ; may i feel said he ; my specialty is living said ; you shall above all things be glad and young ; flotsam and jetsam ; the way to hump a cow is not ; as freedom is a breakfastfood ; anyone lived in a pretty how town ; my father moved through dooms of love ; plato told ; pity this busy monster, manunkind ; what if a much of a which of a wind ; all ignorance toboggans into know ; maggie and milly and molly and may ; in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt / E.E. Cummings My grandmother's love letters ; Praise for an urn ; Chaplinesque ; In shadow ; Repose of rivers ; Passage ; The wine menagerie ; For the marriage of Faustus and Helen ; Voyages ; From The bridge to Brooklyn Bridge ; Ave Maria ; The river ; To Emily Dickinson ; The broken tower / Hart Crane Ode to the Confederate dead ; The subway ; Mr. Pope ; The paradigm ; The wolves ; Last days of Alice ; Aeneas at Washington ; Sonnets at Christmas ; The swimmers / Allen Tate The rows of cold trees ; The slow Pacific swell ; Orpheus ; On teaching the young ; Theseus: a trilogy ; John Sutter ; At the San Francisco Airport / Yvor Winters The weary blues ; Dream variations ; The Negro speaks of rivers ; Fire ; 50-50 ; Stony Lonesome ; Ballad of the landlord ; Heaven ; Personal ; Madam and the Minister ; Preference ; Necessity ; Theme for English B / Langston Hughes The Ballad of Billie Potts ; Bearded Oakes ; Two pieces after Suetonius ; From Mortmain / Robert Penn Warren Open house ; "Long live the weeds" ; Cuttings ; Cuttings, later ; Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze ; My Papa's waltz ; The minimal ; Four for Sir John Davies ; The waking ; Words for the wind ; I knew a woman ; Snake ; From Meditations of an old woman: first meditation ; What can I tell my bones? ; The rose In a dark time / Theodore Roethke The Kingfishers ; The Ring of From The Maximus poems I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you (in part) ; Maximus, to himself ; Maximus to Gloucester, Letter ; Variations done for Gerald Van de Wiele / Charles Olson The map ; The man-moth ; The monument ; The fish ; Questions of travel ; The armadillo ; First death in Nova Scotia ; In the waiting room / Elizabeth Bishop In the naked bed, in Plato's cave ; The heavy bear who goes with me / Delmore Schwartz 90 North ; The death of the Ball Turret Gunner ; Eighth Air Force ; The range in the desert ; A girl in a library ; The Orient Express ; Well water ; Woman ; Thinking of the lost world / Randall Jarrell The ball poem ; A professor's song ; A Winter-piece to a friend away ; From Homage to Mistress Bradstreet ; From 77 dream songs ; Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so (14) ; A strut for Roethke ; From His toy, his dream his rest A thurn (126) ; Again, his friend's death made the man sit still (127) ; Henry's mind grew blacker the more he thought (147) This world is gradually becoming a place (149) So long? Stevens (219) ; Henry's understanding / John Berryman From Venice was that afternoon ; The stranger ; Forest ; Primer of Plato / Jean Garrigue As a Plane tree by the water ; The Quaker graveyard in Nantucket ; The drunken fisherman ; At the Indian killer's grave ; In the cage ; Mr. Edwards and the spider ; Beyond the Alps ; Memories of West Street and Lepke ; Skunk hour ; Water ; The old flame ; For the Union dead ; Waking early Sunday morning ; Near the ocean ; Dolphin ; T.S. Eliot ; Ezra Pound ; For John Berryman I ; Last things, Black Pines at 4 a.m. / Robert Lowell A song in the front yard ; Sadie and Maud ; Of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery ; The vacant lot ; The lovers of the poor ; Of Robert Frost ; The sermon on the Warpland ; The second sermon on the Warpland / Gwendolyn Brooks The temple of the animals ; Often I am permitted to return to a meadow ; This place rumord to have been Sodom ; The ballad of Mrs. Noah ; Poetry, a natural thing ; Persephone ; Passage over water ; Homage and lament for Ezra Pound in Captivity, May 12, 1944 ; Tribal memories Passages 1 ; What I saw Passages 3 / Robert Duncan Cigales ; My father paints the summer ; "A world without objects is a sensible emptiness" ; The pardon ; Epistemology ; Grasse: the olive trees ; A voice from under the table ; All these birds ; A hole in the floor ; On the marginal way ; Playboy / Richard Wilbur The Dover bitch ; Birdwatchers of America ; "More light! More light!" ; "It out-Herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it" / Anthony Hecht The underground steam ; The performance ; The heaven of animals ; A birth ; Buckdancer's choice ; The sheep child / James Dickey Carentan O Carentan ; To the Western world ; The Troika ; My father in the night commanding No ; American poetry ; Dvonya ; The country house ; The climate of paradise / Louis Simpson Illustrious ancestors ; Pleasures ; The Goddess ; Matins ; The ache of marriage ; Losing track ; The earth worm ; The cat as cat ; The mutes ; What wild dawns there were ; Relearning the alphabet / Denise Levertov So I said I am Ezra ; Unsaid ; Triphammer Bridge ; Coon song ; The Yucca moth ; Corsons Inlet ; Apologia pro Vita Sua ; Laser ; Cascadilla Falls ; Classic ; Periphery ; Upland ; The unifying principle ; The city limits / A.R. Ammons An urban convalescence ; After Greece ; The Parrot Fish ; The furnished room ; The broken home ; The mad scene ; A preface to the memoirs ; Matinees / James Merrill I know a man ; The death of Venus ; Wait for me ; Naughty boy ; If you ; Heroes ; The gift ; For love ; The fire ; The window ; Fancy ; Here / Robert Creeley A supermarket in California ; Sunflower Sutra ; From Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956 ; Hymmnn ; My Alba ; On Burroughs' work ; Dream record: June 8, 1955 ; Wales visitation / Allen Ginsberg Poem (At night Chinamen jump) ; Poem (The eager note on my door said "Call me") ; Chez Jane ; To the film industry in crisis ; The day Lady died ; Why I am not a painter ; Autobiographia Literaria ; Les Luths / Frank O'Hara Waking from sleep ; Poem in three parts ; Poem against the rich ; Snowfall in the afternoon ; Come with me ; Sleet storm on the Merritt Parkway ; Johnson's cabinet watched by ants ; Romans angry about the inner world ; When the dumb speak ; Looking at some flowers ; Looking into a face ; Evolution from the fish / Robert Bly The instruction manual ; The painter ; Rivers and mountains ; Spring day ; Years of indiscretion ; Worsening situation ; The one thing that can save America ; Tenth symphony ; Märchenbilder / John Ashbery The supper after the Last ; For Robert Frost ; Flower herding on Mount Monadnock ; The correspondence school instructor says goodbye to his poetry students ; The porcupine ; The dead shall be raised incorruptible ; The path among the stones / Galway Kinnell Ballad of John Cable and three gentlemen ; Song of three smiles ; Leviathan ; Birds waking ; Odysseus ; The room ; For the anniversary of my death ; In the winter of my thirty-eighth year ; The Asians dying ; Looking for mushrooms at sunrise ; The approaches ; The distances ; The old boast ; Surf-casting ; Exercise / W.S. Merwin Complaint ; Evening ; A breath of air ; Saint Judas ; Lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota ; A blessing ; Milkweed ; To flood stage again ; Three sentences for a dead swan ; Written in a copy of Swift's poems, for Wayne Burns / James Wright Above it all ; To a child trapped in a barber shop ; The lost angel ; Animals are passing from our lives ; Salami ; They feed they Lion The way down / Philip Levine From Gloucester out ; Thesis ; From Oxford: Part III, Comforted by Limestone ; From Gunslinger: an idle visitation / Edward Dorn The afterwake ; Necessities of life ; The trees ; Two songs ; "I am in danger- Sir- " ; 5:30 A.M. ; Planetarium ; Diving in the wreck ; Merced / Adrienne Rich Piute Creek ; Riprap ; From Logging: 3 ; From Hunting first shaman song (1) ; this poem is for bear (6) ; this poem is for deer (8) ; From Burning second shaman song (1) ; John Muir on Mt Ritter (8) ; The snow on Saddle Mountain ; A walk ; A heifer clambers up ; Four poems for Robin ; Long hair ; Pine tree tops / Gary Snyder The Colossus ; Morning song ; The applicant ; Lady Lazarus ; Elm ; Ariel ; Gulliver ; Daddy ; Fever 103 ; Blackberrying ; Event ; Love letter ; A life / Sylvia Plath For Hettie ; A poem some people will have to understand ; Legacy ; I substitute for the dead lecturer ; A poem for speculative hipsters ; The liar ; Evil Nigger waits for lightnin' ; W.W. ; Numbers, letters / Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)