E. E. Cummings, [since feeling is first]
John Ciardi, “Most Like an Arch This Marriage”
Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Robert Hass, “Envy of Other People’s Poems”
E. B. White, “Natural History”
Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso list to hount”
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Signs”
William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”
Heather McHugh, “Etymological Dirge”
Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 56 (“Sweet love, renew thy force”)
Anna Akhmatova, “While Reading Hamlet“
Paul Muldoon, “Bosworth Field”
Kathy Fagan, “Letter from the Garden”
David St. John, “In the High Country”
Abraham Lincoln, “Abraham Lincoln”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 48
Robert Bridges, “I Love All Beauteous Things”
Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Common Dust”
Andrew Hudgins, “Wasps in August”
Tami Haaland, “A Colander of Barley”
Eavan Boland, “Becoming Anne Bradstreet”
Robert Burns, “O were my Love yon Lilack fair”
Michael Heffernan, “A Figure of Plain Force”
Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking”
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
John Milton, Sonnet 19 [“When I consider how my light is spent”]
William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”
John Donne, Holy Sonnet X/XIV [“Batter my heart, three-person’d God”]
Helen Maria Williams, “To Mrs. K—-, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris”
Diane Di Prima, “Song for Baby-O, Unborn”
You have memorized all of these? What a great idea! 🙂
I’m trying! They tend to fall out of my head after a while, and now there’s so many it’s hard to practice them all!