| Alexander Pope | 1712 | The Rape of the Lock | "Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, and beauty draws us with a single hair" |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson | 1854 | The Charge of the Light Brigade | "Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die" "All in the valley of death rode the six hundred" |
| Alfred, Lord Tennyson | 1859 | Idylls of the King | - |
| Allen Ginsberg | 1956 | Howl | "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" |
| Carl Sandburg | 1916 | Chicago Poems | "Hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat" "Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders" "Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler" |
| Dante Alighieri | 1321 | The Divine Comedy | "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" |
| Edgar Allan Poe | 1845 | The Raven | "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" "Quoth the raven, nevermore" "Tis some visitor... tapping at my chamber door - only this and nothing more" |
| Edgar Allan Poe | 1849 | The Bells | "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells" "How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of the night" "What a world of merriment their melody foretells!" "Through the balmy air of night how they ring out their delight" |
| Edgar Allan Poe | 1849 | Annabel Lee | "In her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea" "It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea" "I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea" "And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me" |
| Edgar Lee Masters | 1915 | Spoon River Anthology | - |
| Edmund Spenser | 1590 | The Faerie Queene | - |
| Edward Lear | 1870 | The Owl and the Pussy-Cat | "Dined on mince and slices of quince which they ate with a runcible spoon" "Hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon" "Went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat" |
| Ernest Lawrence Thayer | 1888 | Casey at the Bat | "There is no joy in Mudville, mighty Casey has struck out" "It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville Nine that day" "Responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat" |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 1847 | Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie | "Benedict Bellefontaine, the wealthiest farmer of Grand-Pré" "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks" |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 1855 | The Song of Hiawatha | "By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water" "From the water-fall he named her, Minnehaha, Laughing Water" |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 1861 | Paul Revere's Ride | "Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride..." "Ready to ride and spread the alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm" |
| Homer | 700s BC | Iliad | - |
| Homer | 700s BC | Odyssey | - |
| John Donne | 1633 | Death Be Not Proud | "though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so" "One short sleep past, we wake eternally" |
| John Keats | 1819 | Ode to a Nightingale | "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!" |
| John Keats | 1819 | Ode on a Grecian Urn | "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter" |
| John Milton | 1667 | Paradise Lost | "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree" |
| Joyce Kilmer | 1913 | Trees | "Poems are made by fools like me, but only god can make a tree" "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree" |
| Lewis Carroll | 1871 | Jabberwocky | "All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe" "Beware the jubjub bird, and shun the frumious bandersnatch" "The vorpal blade went snicker-snack" "Twas brillig & the slithy toves did gyre & gimble in the wabe" |
| Omar Khayyam | c. 1100 | The Rubáiyát | "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou beside me singing in the wilderness" |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 1798 | The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | "Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung" "With my crossbow I shot the albatross" "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" |
| T.S. Eliot | 1915 | The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table" "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" "In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo" |
| T.S. Eliot | 1922 | The Waste Land | "April is the cruelest month" |
| Virgil | 19 BC | The Aeneid | "I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts" "I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate, first came from the coast of Troy to Italy" |
| Walt Whitman | 1855 | Leaves of Grass | - |
| William Blake | 1794 | The Tyger | "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" |
