The Penguin anthology of twentieth-century American poetry

Edgar Lee Masters

Edwin Arlington Robinson

James Weldon Johnson

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Robert Frost

Amy Lowell

Gertrude Stein

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Carl Sandburg

Wallace Stevens

Angelina Weld Grimke

William Carlos Williams

Sara Teasdale

Ezra Pound

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Robinson Jeffers

Marianne Moore

T.S. Eliot

Claude McKay

Archibald MacLeish

Edna St. Vincent Millay

E.E. Cummings

Jean Toomer

Louise Bogan

Melvin B. Tolson

Hart Crane

Robert Francis

Langston Hughes

Countee Cullen

Stanley Kunitz

W.H. Auden

Theodore Roethke

Charles Olson

Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Hayden

Muriel Rukeyser

Delmore Schwartz

John Berryman

Randall Jarrell

Weldon Kees

Dudley Randall

William Stafford

Ruth Stone

Margaret Walker

Gwendolyn Brooks

Robert Lowell

Robert Duncan

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

William Meredith

Howard Nemerov

Hayden Carruth

Richard Wilbur

James Dickey

Alan Dugan

Anthony Hecht

Richard Hugo

Denise Levertov

Louis Simpson

Carolyn Kizer

Kenneth Koch

Maxine Kumin

Gerald Stern

A.R. Ammons

Robert Bly

Robert Creeley

James Merrill

Frank O'Hara

John Ashbery.

Galway Kinnell

W.S. Merwin

James Wright

Donald Hall

Philip Levine

Anne Sexton

Adrienne Rich

Gregory Corso

Gary Snyder

Derek Walcott

Miller Williams

Etheridge Knight

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Ted Berrigan

Audre Lorde

Sonia Sanchez

Mark Strand

Russell Edson

Mary Oliver

Charles Wright

Lucille Clifton

June Jordan

Frederick Seidel

C.K. Williams

Diane Wakoski

Michael S. Harper

Charles Simic

Paula Gunn Allen

Frank Bidart

Carl Dennis

Stephen Dunn

Robert Pinsky

James Welch

Billy Collins

Toi Derricotte

Stephen Dobyns

Robert Hass

Lyn Hejinian

B.H. Fairchild

Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

William Matthews

Sharon Olds

Henry Taylor

Tess Gallagher

Michael Palmer

James Tate

Norman Dubie

Carol Muske-Dukes

Kay Ryan

Larry Levis

Adrian C. Louis

Thomas Lux

Marilyn Nelson

Ron Silliman

Ai

Yusef Komunyakaa

Nathaniel Mackey

Gregory Orr

Roberta Hill Whiteman

Albert Goldbarth

Heather McHugh

Leslie Marmon Silko

Olga Broumas

Victor Hernandez Cruz

Jane Miller

David St. John

C.D. Wright

Carolyn Forche

Jorie Graham

Marie Howe.

Joy Harjo

Garrett Hongo

Andrew Hudgins

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Paul Muldoon

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Rita Dove

Alice Fulton

Barbara Hamby

Mark Jarman

Naomi Shihab Nye

Alberto Rios

Laurie Sheck

Gary Soto

Susan Stewart

Mark Doty

Harryette Mullen

Franz Wright

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sandra Cisneros

Cornelius Eady

Louise Erdrich

David Mason

Marilyn Chin

Cathy Song

Annie Finch

Li-Young Lee

Carl Phillips

Nick Flynn

Elizabeth Alexander

Reetika Vazirani

Sherman Alexie

Natasha Trethewey

A.E. Stallings

Joanna Klink

Brenda Shaughnessy

Kevin Young

Terrance Hayes.

The hill

Fiddler Jones

Petit, the poet / Edgar Lee Masters

Miniver Cheevy

Mr. Flood's party / Edwin Arlington Robinson

The creation / James Weldon Johnson

The poet

Life's tragedy / Paul Laurence Dunbar

The death of the hired man

Mending wall

Birches

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Tree at my window

Directive / Robert Frost

Patters / Amy Lowell

Susie Asado

From Tender buttons : A box ; A plate / Gertrude Stein

I sit and sew / Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Grass

Cahoots / Carl Sandburg

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Disillusionment of ten o'clock

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird

Anecdote of the jar

The emperor of ice-cream

Of mere being / Wallace Stevens

Fragment / Angelina Weld Grimké

Tract

Danse Russe

The red wheelbarrow

The yachts

From Asphodel, that greeny flower (book I, lines 1-92) / William Carlos Williams

Moonlight

There will come soft rains / Sara Teasdale

The jewel stairs' grievance

The river-merchants' wife: a letter

In a station of the metro

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

From Canto LXXXI (Libretto: "Yet / Ere the season died a-cold") / Ezra Pound

Sea rose

Helen

From The walls do not fall : 1 ("An incident here and there")

From Hermetic definition: "Red rose and a beggar" : 1 ("Why did you come") ; 2 ("Take me anywhere") ; 5 ("Venice

Venus?") /

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Gale in April

Shine, perishing republic

Clouds at evening

Credo / Robinson Jeffers

The fish

Poetry

Poetry / Marianne Moore

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Preludes

The waste land / T.S. Eliot

If we must die

The Harlem dancer / Claude McKay

Ars poetica / Archibald MacLeish

First fig

Recuerdo / Edna St. Vincent Millay

in Just-

Buffalo Bill's

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

next to of course god america i

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r / E.E. Cummings

Reapers

November cotton flower

Portrait in Georgia / Jean Toomer

Medusa

New moon / Louise Bogan

Dark symphony

From Harlem gallery: Psi ("Black boy, / let me get up from the white man's table...") / Melvin B. Tolson

From The bridge [excerpts] : Proem : To Brooklyn Bridge ; From II : Powhatan's daughter : The river / Hart Crane

Silent poem / Robert Francis

The Negro speaks of rivers

I, too

Dream boogie

Harlem / Langston Hughes

Incident

To John Keats, poet, at spring time

Yet do I marvel

From the dark tower / Countee Cullen

Father and son

The portrait

Touch me / Stanley Kunitz

Musée des Beaux Arts

Epitaph on a tyrant / W.H. Auden

My papa's waltz

The waking

In a dark time / Theodore Roethke

From The maximus poems : I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you

The distances / Charles Olson

The fish

Sestina

First death in Nova Scotia

Visits to St. Elizabeths

One art / Elizabeth Bishop

Mourning poem for the queen of Sunday

Those winter Sundays

Frederick Douglass / Robert Hayden

Effort at speech between two people

Then I saw what the calling was

The poem as mask / Muriel Rukeyser

The heavy bear who goes with me / Delmore Schwartz

From The dream songs : 4 ("Filling her compact & delicious body") ; 14 ("Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.") ; 29 ("There sat down, once") ; 149 ("This world is gradually becoming a place")

Henry's understanding / John Berryman

90 north

The death of the ball turret gunner

The woman at the Washington Zoo

Next day / Weldon Kees

A different image / Dudley Randall

Traveling through the dark

At the bomb testing site / William Stafford

Scars / Ruth Stone

For my people / Margaret Walker

The mother

A song in the front yard

The bean eaters

The lovers of the poor

We real cool

The blackstone rangers / Gwendolyn Brooks

"To speak of woe that is in marriage"

Skunk hour

For the union dead / Robert Lowell

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

My mother would be a falconress / Robert Duncan

Populist manifesto / Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Parents / William Meredith

Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry / Howard Nemerov

The hyacinth garden in Brooklyn

August 1945 / Hayden Carruth

Love calls us to the things of this world

Cottage Street, 1953

The winter / Richard Wilbur

The sheep child / James Dickey

Love song: I and thou / Alan Dugan

"More light! more light!" / Anthony Hecht

Degrees of gray in Philipsburg

The freaks at Spurgin Road Field / Richard Hugo

The poem unwritten

Caedmon

Swan in falling snow / Denise Levertov

American poetry / Louis Simpson

A muse of water / Carolyn Kizer

Fresh air

Permanently / Kenneth Koch

Morning swim

How it is / Maxine Kumin

Behaving like a Jew

The dancing

Another insane devotion / Gerald Stern

The city limits

Corsons Inlet / A.R. Ammons

Snowfall in the afternoon

Driving to town late to mail a letter

Waking from sleep / Robert Bly

The flower

I know a man

The language

The rain

Bresson's movies / Robert Creeley

The victor dog / James Merrill

Steps

Poem ("Lana Turner has collapsed!")

The day Lady died / Frank O'Hara

Some trees

Self-portrait in a convex mirror

What is poetry / John Ashbery

The bear

After making love we hear footsteps

Saint Francis and the sow / Galway Kinnell

Air

For the anniversary of my death

Yesterday

Chord / W.S. Merwin

A blessing

Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

In response to a rumor that the oldest whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia has been condemned / James Wright

My son my executioner

Digging / Donald Hall

Animals are passing from our lives

They feed they lion

You can have it

The simple truth / Philip Levine

Her kind

The abortion

Wanting to die

In celebration of my uterus

Rowing / Anne Sexton

Orion

Planetarium

A valediction forbidding mourning

From Twenty-one love poems : XIII ("The rules break like a thermometer...") / Adrienne Rich

Marriage / Gregory Corso

Hay for the horses

Riprap

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout / Gary Snyder

A far cry from Africa

Sea grapes

From The schooner : Flight (part 11, After the storm : "There's a fresh light that follows...")

The light of the world

From Omeros, Book VII, LXIV, i ("I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe's son...") / Derek Walcott

Let me tell you / Miller Williams

The idea of ancestry / Etheridge Knight

Preface to a twenty volume suicide note

An agony. As now.

SOS

Black art / Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Wrong train

A final sonnet / Ted Berrigan

Power / Audre Lorde

poem at thirty / Sonia Sanchez

The prediction

The night, the porch / Mark Strand

A stone is nobody's / Russell Edson

Singapore

The summer day / Mary Oliver

Reunion

Dead color

California dreaming / Charles Wright

homage to my hips

[at last we killed the roaches]

the death of fred clifton

to my last period / Lucille Clifton

Poem about my rights / June Jordan

1968 / Frederick Seidel

From my window

Blades / C.K. Williams

The mechanic / Diane Wakoski

Dear John, Dear Coltraine

Last affair : Bessie's blues song

Grandfather

Nightmare begins responsibility / Michael S. Harper

Stone

Fork

Classic ballroom dances / Charles Simic

Grandmother / Paula Gunn Allen

Ellen West / Frank Bidart

Spring letter

Two or three wishes / Carl Dennis

Allegory of the cave

Tucson / Stephen Dunn

History of my heart

The questions

Samurai song / Robert Pinsky

Christmas comes to Moccasin Flat / James Welch

Introduction to poetry

The dead / Billy Collins

Allen Ginsberg

The Weakness / Toi Derricotte

How to like it

Lullaby / Stephen Dobyns

Song

The pornographer

The return of Robinson Jeffers / Robert Hass

From My life : A name trimmed with colored ribbons / Lyn Hejinian

The machinist, teaching his daughter to play the piano / B.H. Fairchild

But he was cool or: he even stopped for green lights

A poem to complement other poems / Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

In memory of the Utah stars

The accompanist / William Matthews

The language of the brag

The lifting / Sharon Olds

Barbed wire / Henry Taylor

Black silk

Under stars / Tess Gallagher

I do not / Michael Palmer

The lost pilot / James Tate

Elizabeth's war with the Christmas bear

The funeral / Norman Dubie

August, Los Angeles, Lullaby / Carol Muske-Dukes

Turtle

Bestiary / Kay Ryan

Childhood ideogram

Winter stars / Larry Lewis

Looking for Judas / Adrian C. Louis

The people of the other village / Thomas Lux

The ballad of Aunt Geneva

Star-fix / Marilyn Nelson

Albany / Ron Silliman

Cuba, 1962

The kid

Finished / Ai

Thanks

Tu Do Street

Facing it

Nude interrogation / Yusef Komonyakaa

Song of the Andoumboulou : 21 / Nathaniel Mackey

Gathering the bones together

Two lines from the Brothers Grimm

Origin of the marble forest / Gregory Orr

Reaching Yellow River / Roberta Hill Whiteman

Away / Albert Goldbarth

Language lesson

What he thought / Heather McHugh

In cold storm light / Leslie Marmon Silko

Calypso / Olga Broumas

Latin & soul / Victor Hernández Cruz

Miami heart / Jane Miller

Iris / David St. John

Why Ralph refuses to dance

Girl friend poem #3

Crescent / C.D. Wright

Taking off my clothes / Carolyn Forché

San Sepolcro / Jorie Graham

What the living do / Marie Howe

She had some horses

My house is the red earth / Joy Harjo

The legend / Garrett Hongo

Begotten

We were simply talking / Andrew Hudgins

Imagining their own hymns

Song / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Meeting the British

Errata

The throwback / Paul Muldoon

Quinceañera / Judith Ortiz Cofer

Parsley

Daystar

After reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the third time before bed

Claudette Colvin goes to work / Rita Dove

Our calling / Alice Fulton

Thinking of Galileo

Hatred / Barbara Hamby

Unholy sonnet 13 / Mark Jarman

The traveling onion

Arabic

Wedding cake / Naomi Shihab Nye

Nani

England finally, like my mother always said we would / Alberto Ríos

Nocturne : Blue waves

The unfinished / Laurie Sheck

Field poem

Oranges

Black hair / Gary Soto

Yellow stars and ice

The forest / Susan Stewart

Brilliance

Esta noche

Bill's story / Mark Doty

Black Nikes / Harryette Mullen

Alcohol / Franz Wright

To my brother

"Love of my flesh, living death" / Lorna Dee Cervantes

My wicked wicked ways

Little clown, my heart / Sandra Cisneros

Jack Johnson does the eagle rock

Crows in a strong wind

I'm a fool to love you / Cornelius Eady

Indian Boarding School : The runaways / Louise Erdrich

Spooning / David Mason

How I got that name

Composed near the Bay Bridge

The survivor / Marilyn Chin

The youngest daughter / Cathy Song

Another reluctance

Insect / Annie Finch

The gift

Eating together / Li-young Lee

Our lady

As from a quiver of arrows / Carl Phillips

Bag of mice

Cartoon physics, part 1 / Nick Flynn

The Venus Hottentot

Affirmative action blues (1993)

Equinox / Elizabeth Alexander

From White elephants : A million balconies ; Train windows / Reetika Vazirani

What the orphan inherits

The powwow at the end of the world / Sherman Alexie

How combs

Amateur fighter

Flounder / Natasha Trethewey

The tantrum / A.E. Stallings

Spare / Joanna Klink

Postfeminism

Your one good dress / Brenda Shaughnessy

Quivira city limits

Everywhere is out of town

Whatever you want / Kevin Young

At Pegasus

Lady sings the blues / Terrance Hayes.