The 17 Most Famous Poems Ever Written

Schoolroom staples share the list with a Shakespeare sonnet and a few lines everybody quotes without knowing where they came from.

1. 1
   The Raven

   Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 narrative poem of a grieving man and a bird that answers only "Nevermore."
   1000pts
2. 2
   Sonnet 18

   Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
   969pts
3. 3
   Howl

   Allen Ginsberg's 1956 Beat Generation poem that went on trial for obscenity.
   673pts
4. 4
   Ode to a Nightingale

   John Keats's 1819 ode on beauty and mortality.
   658pts
5. 5
   I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

   William Wordsworth's poem of the daffodils.
   658pts
6. 6
   The Tyger

   William Blake's 1794 poem asking what hand could frame the tiger's fearful symmetry.
   538pts
7. 7
   The Road Not Taken

   Robert Frost's 1916 poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood.
   538pts
8. 8
   Ozymandias

   Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 sonnet on a shattered statue in the desert.
   538pts
9. 9
   Kubla Khan

   Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-dream vision of Xanadu.
   466pts
10. 10
    The Charge of the Light Brigade

    Alfred Tennyson's 1854 poem on a disastrous cavalry charge.
    466pts
11. 11
    Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

    Dylan Thomas's villanelle urging his dying father to rage against death.
    466pts
12. 12
    Paradise Lost

    John Milton's 1667 epic of Satan's rebellion and the fall of man.
    384pts
13. 13
    Still I Rise

    Maya Angelou's 1978 poem of defiance and dignity.
    384pts
14. 14
    Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

    Robert Frost's quiet poem with "miles to go before I sleep."
    290pts
15. 15
    O Captain! My Captain!

    Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln.
    179pts
16. 16
    Because I could not stop for Death

    Emily Dickinson's poem of a carriage ride with Death.
    179pts
17. 17
    If—

    Rudyard Kipling's 1910 poem of fatherly advice.
    0pts

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