Poems in English: Top 5

Selecting just five poems from across English literary history is quite a challenge! Nevertheless, here are five that are often taught in British or American schools. These are poems about life’s big themes: love, death, solitude and struggle. All the poets mentioned had a major cultural impact at the time they were writing, and all five poems below are still read and quoted today.

The choice has been made with historical perspective, which is why three of the poets are white, male, and English. All the poems are from Britain or the US, even though the profile of people publishing poetry in the language is considerably more varied and people from around the globe have written world-changing poetry in English. There are many omissions: we could have gone all the way back to the Old English epic poem Beowulf, written in the 1st century; drawn on the work of Chaucer, who was writing in the late 1300s; or come right up-to-date with the poems of American poet laureate Ada Limón, born in 1976.

From the love sonnets that mimic the rhythm of a beating heart (Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter) to lines that stirred the souls of Black rights protesters, here is the work of  five poets writing in English who have changed the way we think. 

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18 (1590s)

Today, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is best known for his plays — he wrote around thirty-seven of them — but he also wrote poems including 154 sonnets, many on the theme of love. The most famous is probably Sonnet 18. It’s often interpreted as a romantic love poem addressed to a woman but, in fact, it was certainly written to a man and more likely expressed platonic rather than romantic love. It’s one of 126 sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to a mysterious male figure called “the Fair Youth” who some scholars believe was the attractive young aristocrat Henry Wriothesley. Sonnet 18 compares the beloved to a beautiful summer’s day but concludes that his beauty, as described in the poem, is more perfect and will last longer. In fact, suggests Shakespeare, his beauty will stay alive for as long as people continue to read about it in the poem. 

The fourteen-line sonnet form was nothing new but Shakespeare developed a distinctive version with three four-line verses (called ‘quatrains’) plus a pair of rhyming lines (a ‘rhyming couplet’) at the end. Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter (lines of ten syllables with alternating unstressed and then stressed syllables), as well as his typical sonnet rhyme scheme of ABAB, whereby in each quatrain the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth lines rhyme.

2. William Wordsworth:
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1804)

One of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) focused on ideas of beauty and the sublime, that is, the realm of experience beyond rational thought, in his work. This seemed especially urgent as the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) was changing people’s traditional relationship with nature. Wordsworth lived in the Lake District in northwest England and the dramatic landscapes of the region inspired many of his poems. In I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Wordsworth describes walking alone in the countryside and suddenly seeing a lot of yellow daffodils growing wild (daffodils grow abundantly in England in spring.) At the end of the poem, Wordsworth reflects on the joy of being able to recall a scene from nature, like that of the daffodils, when he is alone. 

3. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese,
nº 43 (1845-46)

By the mid-1840s, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was one of the leading English poets of the time, popular both in Britain and the United States. She had been born into a wealthy family but was politically engaged, writing poems defending the rights of the poor and oppressed. In 1843, she published a poem called The Cry of the Children about the suffering of children forced to work in factories and mines. And in 1848 she published the poem The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, protesting against slavery in America, even though her own family had made its money using slave labour. Her long poem Aurora Leigh (1857) is now seen as an early feminist text.

In 1845, another well-known English poet, Robert Browning, wrote to Barrett after reading her work and the couple married in secret against the wishes of Barrett’s family. In 1850, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning was persuaded by Robert to publish a collection of forty-four love poems called Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she had written in 1845-6. These sonnets, like Shakespeare’s, use iambic pentameter. Several of them remain well known today, especially Sonnet nº 43, which is a popular choice for wedding celebrations. Here are the first lines. Notice the ABBA rhyme scheme.

4. Wilfred Owen: Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was one of the First World War poets. His work describes the horrors of life and death for soldiers in the trenches of France during the 1914-18 war. He depicts in graphic detail the suffering caused by the gas attacks and bombs and mud. Owens himself suffered from shell shock and while trying to recover was inspired by another English war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, to write poetry about his own experience in the trenches. Owen completely rejects any idea of patriotism or glorification of war. In his 1917 poem Anthem for DoomedYouth, he writes about young men dying “like cattle”, forgotten by their country. In Dulce et Decorum Est, he starts by describing the intense physical suffering of the soldiers in the trenches and ends by condemning as “the old Lie”, the patriotic Latin expression of the poem’s title that translates: “How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” Owen died in action in France aged twenty-five, exactly a week before Armistice Day. 

5. Maya Angelou: Still I Rise (1978)

Maya Angelou (1928-2014), born in St. Louis, Missouri, had a varied career that included dance, composing, acting, directing and teaching. She is best known, however, for her poetry, autobiography and activism. She worked with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), is a memoir of her traumatic childhood. Many of her poems address themes of civil rights, especially for women and Black people, and often express a sense of exuberance and optimism. Her poem Phenomenal Woman (1978), which has the refrain “I’m a woman/ Phenomenally./ Phenomenal woman,/That’s me…” has a celebratory tone. Here are the first and last lines of Angelou’s poem Still I Rise, about the experience of being Black in America. It was often quoted after the election of Barack Obama as US president in 2008.