# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published October 13, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-17-most-famous-poems-ever-written*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Raven** — score 1000/1000
   Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 narrative poem of a grieving man and a bird that answers only "Nevermore."
2. **Sonnet 18** — score 969/1000
   Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
3. **Howl** — score 673/1000
   Allen Ginsberg's 1956 Beat Generation poem that went on trial for obscenity.
4. **Ode to a Nightingale** — score 658/1000
   John Keats's 1819 ode on beauty and mortality.
5. **I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud** — score 658/1000
   William Wordsworth's poem of the daffodils.
6. **The Tyger** — score 538/1000
   William Blake's 1794 poem asking what hand could frame the tiger's fearful symmetry.
7. **The Road Not Taken** — score 538/1000
   Robert Frost's 1916 poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood.
8. **Ozymandias** — score 538/1000
   Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 sonnet on a shattered statue in the desert.
9. **Kubla Khan** — score 466/1000
   Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-dream vision of Xanadu.
10. **The Charge of the Light Brigade** — score 466/1000
   Alfred Tennyson's 1854 poem on a disastrous cavalry charge.
11. **Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night** — score 466/1000
   Dylan Thomas's villanelle urging his dying father to rage against death.
12. **Paradise Lost** — score 384/1000
   John Milton's 1667 epic of Satan's rebellion and the fall of man.
13. **Still I Rise** — score 384/1000
   Maya Angelou's 1978 poem of defiance and dignity.
14. **Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening** — score 290/1000
   Robert Frost's quiet poem with "miles to go before I sleep."
15. **O Captain! My Captain!** — score 179/1000
   Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln.
16. **Because I could not stop for Death** — score 179/1000
   Emily Dickinson's poem of a carriage ride with Death.
17. **If—** — score 0/1000
   Rudyard Kipling's 1910 poem of fatherly advice.

Tags: books, poetry, poems