Sonnets

A grieving man, a midnight visitor, one repeated word. The most famous poem in American literature, and the easiest to memorize.

Edgar Allan Poe

An American poet rewrote what poetry could sound like in 1855 and kept revising it for the rest of his life. Open at any page.

Walt Whitman

Satan, Adam, Eve, and the fall told in 12 books of blank verse. Written by a blind man dictating to his daughters.

John Milton

Paris, opium, dead lovers, urban dread. Baudelaire invented modern poetry with this 1857 book and got prosecuted for it.

Charles Baudelaire

One short poem of advice from a father to a son. It has been engraved on more walls than any other English poem.

Rudyard Kipling