Poems by Theme

Poems About Social Inequality

1. "Let America Be America Again" – Langston Hughes
   
   

2. "Still I Rise" – Maya Angelou
   
   

3. "I, Too" – Langston Hughes
   
   

4. "Incident" – Countee Cullen
   
   

5. "The Lynching" – Claude McKay
   
   

6. "The Chimney Sweeper" – William Blake
   
   

7. "London" – William Blake
   
   

8. "A Worker Reads History" – Bertolt Brecht
   
   

9. "Ballad of Birmingham" – Dudley Randall
   
   

10. "Theme for English B" – Langston Hughes
    
    

11. "The White Man’s Burden" – Rudyard Kipling
    
    

12. "Caged Bird" – Maya Angelou
    
    

13. "The Mask" – Paul Laurence Dunbar
    
    

14. "What Work Is" – Philip Levine
    
    

15. "The Cry of the Children" – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    
    

16. "To the Paymaster" – Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
    
    

17. "A Far Cry from Africa" – Derek Walcott
    
    

18. "Bury Me in a Free Land" – Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
    
    

19. "America" – Allen Ginsberg
    
    

20. "The New Colossus" – Emma Lazarus

Poems About Love

1. "Sonnet 18" – William Shakespeare
   
   

2. "How Do I Love Thee?" – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
   
   

3. "Love After Love" – Derek Walcott
   
   

4. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" – Christopher Marlowe
   
   

5. "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" – John Donne
   
   

6. "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in)" – E. E. Cummings
   
   

7. "Annabel Lee" – Edgar Allan Poe
   
   

8. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" – Anne Bradstreet
   
   

9. "When You Are Old" – W. B. Yeats
   
   

10. "She Walks in Beauty" – Lord Byron
    
    

11. "Meeting at Night" – Robert Browning
    
    

12. "Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond" – E. E. Cummings
    
    

13. "The Good-Morrow" – John Donne
    
    

14. "Love’s Philosophy" – Percy Bysshe Shelley
    
    

15. "Wild Nights – Wild Nights!" – Emily Dickinson
    
    

16. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" – John Keats
    
    

17. "The More Loving One" – W. H. Auden
    
    

18. "Having a Coke with You" – Frank O’Hara
    
    

19. "Mad Girl’s Love Song" – Sylvia Plath
    
    

20. "Variations on the Word Love" – Margaret Atwood
    
    

Poems About Nature

1. "The Prelude" (excerpt) – William Wordsworth
   
   

2. "To Autumn" – John Keats
   
   

3. "The Road Not Taken" – Robert Frost
   
   

4. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – William Wordsworth
   
   

5. "Birches" – Robert Frost
   
   

6. "God’s Grandeur" – Gerard Manley Hopkins
   
   

7. "Pied Beauty" – Gerard Manley Hopkins
   
   

8. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" – William Wordsworth
   
   

9. "The Peace of Wild Things" – Wendell Berry
   
   

10. "Sleeping in the Forest" – Mary Oliver
    
    

11. "Wild Geese" – Mary Oliver
    
    

12. "Song of Myself" (excerpt) – Walt Whitman
    
    

13. "Fern Hill" – Dylan Thomas
    
    

14. "The Fish" – Elizabeth Bishop
    
    

15. "Design" – Robert Frost
    
    

16. "A Bird Came Down the Walk" – Emily Dickinson
    
    

17. "The Darkling Thrush" – Thomas Hardy
    
    

18. "Hurt Hawks" – Robinson Jeffers
    
    

19. "Inversnaid" – Gerard Manley Hopkins
    
    

20. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" – W. B. Yeats
    
    

Poems About War and Conflict

1. "Dulce et Decorum Est" – Wilfred Owen
   
   

2. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
   
   

3. "The Soldier" – Rupert Brooke
   
   

4. "In Flanders Fields" – John McCrae
   
   

5. "Grass" – Carl Sandburg
   
   

6. "To Any Dead Soldier" – Edna St. Vincent Millay
   
   

7. "The Man He Killed" – Thomas Hardy
   
   

8. "Here, Bullet" – Brian Turner
   
   

9. "Facing It" – Yusef Komunyakaa
   
   

10. "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" – Randall Jarrell
    
    

11. "War is Kind" – Stephen Crane
    
    

12. "Reconciliation" – Walt Whitman
    
    

13. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" – Dylan Thomas
    
    

14. "The Wound-Dresser" – Walt Whitman
    
    

15. "Conscientious Objector" – Edna St. Vincent Millay
    
    

16. "Peace" – Rupert Brooke
    
    

17. "Beach Burial" – Kenneth Slessor
    
    

18. "The Armies of the Night" – Allen Ginsberg
    
    

19. "The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak" – Archibald MacLeish
    
    

20. "Vergissmeinnicht" – Keith Douglas
    
    

Poems About Identity and the Self

1. "Song of Myself" – Walt Whitman
   
   

2. "Phenomenal Woman" – Maya Angelou
   
   

3. "Mirror" – Sylvia Plath
   
   

4. "Theme for English B" – Langston Hughes
   
   

5. "We Wear the Mask" – Paul Laurence Dunbar
   
   

6. "Diving into the Wreck" – Adrienne Rich
   
   

7. "The Applicant" – Sylvia Plath
   
   

8. "Poetry" – Marianne Moore
   
   

9. "Self-Portrait" – David Whyte
   
   

10. "Ego Tripping" – Nikki Giovanni
    
    

11. "A Blessing" – James Wright
    
    

12. "I’m Nobody! Who Are You?" – Emily Dickinson
    
    

13. "One Boy Told Me" – Naomi Shihab Nye
    
    

14. "The Layers" – Stanley Kunitz
    
    

15. "The Journey" – Mary Oliver
    
    

16. "Identity" – Julio Noboa Polanco
    
    

17. "My Name" – Sandra Cisneros
    
    

18. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" – Phillis Wheatley
    
    

19. "This Is Just to Say" – William Carlos Williams
    
    

20. "Me, in Grade Five" – George Bowering
    
    

Poems About Death and Mortality

1. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" – Emily Dickinson
   
   

2. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" – Dylan Thomas
   
   

3. "Death Be Not Proud" – John Donne
   
   

4. "To an Athlete Dying Young" – A. E. Housman
   
   

5. "When Death Comes" – Mary Oliver
   
   

6. "I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died" – Emily Dickinson
   
   

7. "Ozymandias" – Percy Bysshe Shelley
   
   

8. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" – Robert Frost
   
   

9. "The Raven" – Edgar Allan Poe
   
   

10. "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" – Thomas Gray
    
    

11. "Mid-Term Break" – Seamus Heaney
    
    

12. "The Funeral" – John Donne
    
    

13. "The End" – Mark Strand
    
    

14. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" – Dylan Thomas
    
    

15. "The Bustle in a House" – Emily Dickinson
    
    

16. "Requiescat" – Oscar Wilde
    
    

17. "One Art" – Elizabeth Bishop
    
    

18. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" – W. H. Auden
    
    

19. "Song" (“When I am dead, my dearest”) – Christina Rossetti
    
    

20. "The Dead" – Billy Collins
    
    

Poems About Hope and Resilience

1. "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" – Emily Dickinson
   
   

2. "Still I Rise" – Maya Angelou
   
   

3. "Invictus" – William Ernest Henley
   
   

4. "The Road Not Taken" – Robert Frost
   
   

5. "The Hill We Climb" – Amanda Gorman
   
   

6. "If—" – Rudyard Kipling
   
   

7. "Ulysses" – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
   
   

8. "Mother to Son" – Langston Hughes
   
   

9. "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds" – William Shakespeare
   
   

10. "On the Pulse of Morning" – Maya Angelou
    
    

11. "The Journey" – Mary Oliver
    
    

12. "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" – Adam Zagajewski
    
    

13. "O Me! O Life!" – Walt Whitman
    
    

14. "The Laughing Heart" – Charles Bukowski
    
    

15. "We Real Cool" – Gwendolyn Brooks
    
    

16. "Song of the Open Road" – Walt Whitman
    
    

17. "Love Is Not All" – Edna St. Vincent Millay
    
    

18. "Phenomenal Woman" – Maya Angelou
    
    

19. "It Couldn't Be Done" – Edgar Guest
    
    

20. "Don’t Quit" – John Greenleaf Whittier
    
    

Poems About Freedom and Oppression

1. "Caged Bird" – Maya Angelou
   
   

2. "Let America Be America Again" – Langston Hughes
   
   

3. "I, Too" – Langston Hughes
   
   

4. "Still I Rise" – Maya Angelou
   
   

5. "The New Colossus" – Emma Lazarus
   
   

6. "Sympathy" – Paul Laurence Dunbar
   
   

7. "Bury Me in a Free Land" – Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
   
   

8. "The Slave’s Dream" – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   
   

9. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" – Phillis Wheatley
   
   

10. "A Far Cry from Africa" – Derek Walcott
    
    

11. "The Ballad of the Landlord" – Langston Hughes
    
    

12. "To the Paymaster" – Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
    
    

13. "The Lynching" – Claude McKay
    
    

14. "No More Hiroshimas" – James Kirkup
    
    

15. "The Free Man" – Charles Mackay
    
    

16. "Chains" – Laurie Halse Anderson (from her verse novel)
    
    

17. "The Cry of the Children" – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    
    

18. "I’m Nobody! Who Are You?" – Emily Dickinson
    
    

19. "We Wear the Mask" – Paul Laurence Dunbar
    
    

20. "Freedom" – Rabindranath Tagore
    
    

Poems About Childhood and Innocence

1. "The Lamb" – William Blake
   
   

2. "The Chimney Sweeper" – William Blake
   
   

3. "Fern Hill" – Dylan Thomas
   
   

4. "My Papa’s Waltz" – Theodore Roethke
   
   

5. "In Just—" – E. E. Cummings
   
   

6. "A Child Said, What is the Grass?" – Walt Whitman
   
   

7. "Half-Past Two" – U. A. Fanthorpe
   
   

8. "Childhood" – Rainer Maria Rilke
   
   

9. "A Boy Named Sue" – Shel Silverstein
   
   

10. "The Swing" – Robert Louis Stevenson
    
    

11. "Blackberry-Picking" – Seamus Heaney
    
    

12. "Those Winter Sundays" – Robert Hayden
    
    

13. "This Is Just to Say" – William Carlos Williams
    
    

14. "The Toys" – Coventry Patmore
    
    

15. "Little Boy Crying" – Mervyn Morris
    
    

16. "The Schoolboy" – William Blake
    
    

17. "The Toys" – Coventry Patmore
    
    

18. "The Children’s Hour" – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    
    

19. "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" – Anne Bradstreet
    
    

20. "First Death in Nova Scotia" – Elizabeth Bishop