111 Poems from Around the World

Submitted by zerozero on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 03:06
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  1. The Waking, Theodore Roethke (USA)
  2. Wandering Aengus, William Butler Yeats (Ireland)
  3. There are many traps in the world, Ferreira Gullar (Brazil)
  4. More of the Same, Kary Wayson (USA)
  5. Fable X, Janos Pilinzksy (Hungary)
  6. Bear hug, Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada)
  7. Permanently, Kenneth Koch (USA)
  8. Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost (USA)
  9. An Old Woman, Arun Kolatkar (India)
  10. Buddha in Glory, Rainer Maria Rilke (German/Czech Republic/Switzerland)
  11. No Grudges, Lionel Fogarty (Australia)
  12. Drinking Alone with the Moon, Li Bai (China)
  13. Pomegranates, Rabéarivelo (Madagascar)
  14. Rupunzel, Anne Sexton (USA)
  15. Planning a Time Capsule, Bruce Dawe (Australia)
  16. my father moved through dooms of love, e. e. cummings (USA)
  17. Brief thoughts on a test-tube, Miroslave Holub (Czech Republic)
  18. The World is a Beautiful Place, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (USA)
  19. To Make a Talisman, Olga Orozco (Argentina)
  20. Five Ways to Kill A Man, Edwin Brock (England)
  21. What Saves Us, Bruce Weigl (USA/Vietnam)
  22. Love Story, Wendy Cope (England)
  23. Women’s Issue, Margaret Atwood (Canada)
  24. Comets, Dorothy Porter (Australia)
  25. Lesson in Parsing, Rashid Husain (Palestine)
  26. The Farm, Sherman Alexie (USA)
  27. 432 ‘Much madness is divinest sense’, Emily Dickinson (USA)
  28. Sonnet 123 ‘They that have power’, William Shakespeare (England)
  29. Godhorse, Kojo Laing (Ghana)
  30. My Tenth Birthday, Robert Adamson (Australia)
  31. The Mask of Evil, Bertolt Brecht (Germany)
  32. Capital Punishment, Nina Cassian (Romania/USA)
  33. A Man Said to the Universe, Stephen Crane (USA)
  34. The Nobodies, Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay)
  35. I would like to describe, Zbigniew Herbert (Poland)
  36. Easy and Difficult Animals, Keki N. Daruwalla (India)
  37. The Lesson, Don Lineham (Canada/Singapore/Ireland)
  38. If my Hands could Unleaf, Frederico Garcia Lorca (Spain)
  39. The Book of Questions (III), Pablo Neruda (Chile)
  40. A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Craig Raine (England)
  41. Eyes Fastened with Pins, Charles Simic (Serbia/USA)
  42. Five Bells, Kenneth Slessor (Australia)
  43. Onion, Wislawa Szymborska (Poland)
  44. Life Draws a Tree, Roberto Juarroz (Argentina)
  45. Why is this century worse than the others, Anna Akhmatova (Russia)
  46. Autumn Supper, Dimitris Tsaloumas (Greece/Australia)
  47. Stop all the clocks, W. H. Auden (England/USA)
  48. The Answer, Bei Dao (China)
  49. Dream Song 14 ‘Life, friends, is boring’, John Berryman (USA)
  50. To See A World In A Grain of Sand, William Blake (England)
  51. The Destruction of Sennacherib, Lord Byron (England)
  52. Anthem, Roy Campbell (South Africa)
  53. Creator, Harindranth Chattopadhyay (India)
  54. Talking of Sharp Things, Frank Chipasula (Malawi)
  55. Let me die a youngman’s death, Roger McGough (England)
  56. Australia, Ania Walwicz (Poland/Australia)
  57. Ill Humour, Jorge Carrera Andrade (Ecuador)
  58. You May Well Cry, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (Nigeria)
  59. High and Low, Oswald M. Mtshali (South Africa)
  60. Human Life, Coleridge (England)
  61. Middle Age, Kamala Das (India)
  62. Breath, Birago Diop (Senegal)
  63. Newlywed’s Departure, Du Fu (China)
  64. Four Quartets I: Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot (USA)
  65. Dirge, Kenneth Fearing (USA)
  66. For My Mother, Lorna Goodison (Jamaica)
  67. A Pinch of Salt, Robert Graves (England)
  68. Proposition, Nicolas Guillen (Cuba)
  69. Ode #3, Fal e Hafiz (Iran)
  70. Father and Child, Gwen Harwood (Australia)
  71. Punishment, Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
  72. When Young Hearts Break, Heinrich Heine (Germany)
  73. Heaven-Haven: a nun takes the veil, Gerald Manley Hopkins (England)
  74. When I was one and twenty, Alfred Houseman (England)
  75. Dreams, Langston Hughes (USA)
  76. The Grave and the Rose, Victor Hugo (France)
  77. You will forget, Chenjerai Hove (Zimbabwe)
  78. Quiet Spaces, Vincente Huidobro (Chile)
  79. Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats (England)
  80. A Thing Which Fades, Ono No Komachi (Japan)
  81. Contraband, Denise Levertov (England/USA)
  82. Starlight, Phillip Levine (USA)
  83. Rapunzstiltskin, Liz Lochhead (Scotland)
  84. Never Will Abolish, Stephane Mallarme (France)
  85. Spider, Ruth Miller (South Africa)
  86. The Shapes of Fear, Richard Ntiru (Uganda)
  87. Keeping Things Whole, Mark Strand (USA)
  88. Pause, Octavio Paz (Mexico)
  89. To my first white hairs, Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
  90. I am Vertical, Sylvia Plath (USA)
  91. The Menace of Flowers, Alfonso Reyes (Mexico)
  92. A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Adrienne Rich (USA)
  93. Song of the highest tower, Arthur Rimbaud (France)
  94. The Survivor, Tadeusz Rosewicz (Poland)
  95. Fatality, Dario Ruben (Nicaragua)
  96. They, Siegfried Sasson (England)
  97. To A Skylark, Percy Bysse Shelley (England)
  98. This is everything, too, Shu Ting (China)
  99. Nostalgia, Kuang-Chang Yu (Taiwain)
  100. If, Rudyard Kipling (India/England)
  101. Waiting for the Barbarians, Constantine Cavafy (Egypt/Greece)
  102. Good Luck, Oswald de Andrade (Brazil)
  103. Flower in a crannied wall, Alfred Tennyson (England)
  104. Pride, Dhalia Ravikovitch (Israel)
  105. Winter Noon, Saba Umberto (Italy)
  106. Today I like life much less, Cesar Vallejo (Peru/France)
  107. A Psalm of Life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (USA)
  108. Sea Cranes, Derek Walcott (St. Lucia)
  109. Song of Myself # 17, Walt Whitman (USA)
  110. Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen (England)
  111. Song of Fortune VI, Khalil Gibran (Lebanon/USA)
Author Comments: 

This is a list of my favourite poems, which are completely subjective to my personal tastes, so there's probably a lot of the canon that's missing, and of course most of the non-English ones are subject to translation changes.