Poetry gets a bad rep. It gets shoved into our brains in high school, and by the time you've analyzed everything from "Jabberwocky" to "The Road Not Taken", you're pretty done with poems. If that's you, it simply means you haven't found the poems you connect with yet. Good poetry speaks to the soul. Here's ten poems to get you started and help you realize that poetry is really super cool:
1. The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, Sarah Williams
Best Lines:
"Though my soul may set in darkness,
it shall rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night."
2. Mad Girl's Love Song, Sylvia Plath
3. Home, Warsan Shire
"You have to understand
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land"
4. If, Rudyard Kipling
"If you can dream-and not make dreams your master;
If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
and treat those two impostors just the same;"
5. Since Feeling Is First, E.E. Cummings
6. First Fig, Edna St. Vincent Millay
"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!"
7. Invictus, William Ernest Henley
"It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."
8. The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"
9. Fire and Ice, Robert Frost
10. Soliloquy of the Solipsist, Sylvia Plath
"I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott color and forbid any flower
To be."
