Poets love stormy weather. The powers of the natural world revealed in a tempest can be shocking, terrifying and destructive, but they are also awe-inspiring, exhilarating, and metaphorically rich—a perfect source of poetic inspiration. Here we’ve selected a few classic poems describing or inspired by storms—attune yourself to the natural havoc outdoors by reading them while you’re safely sheltering inside from a storm, perhaps, or declaim them to the sky outside after the storm has passed.
- William Shakespeare,
Storm speech on the heath from King Lear (1623)
- William Cullen Bryant,
“The Hurricane” (1854)
- Walt Whitman,
“Proud Music of the Storm” (from Leaves of Grass, 1900 edition)
- Algernon Charles Swinburne,
“A Channel Passage” (1904)
- Amy Lowell,
“Storm-Racked” (1914)
- Robert Frost,
“A Line-Storm Song” (1915)
- Siegfried Sassoon,
“Storm and Sunlight” (1918)
- Jean Toomer,
“Storm Ending” (1922)
