Reading / Studying Poems

By Bob Holman & Margery Snyder, About.com Guides to Poetry

Experience poetry as an educated reader: Here are our collections of classic and contemporary poems to read, study guides and notes to help you understand how poems work their magic, examples and glossaries of poetic forms and techniques, poetry book reviews and shopping lists.

1. Collections of Classic Poems
2. Study Guides for Classic Poems
3. Theme Poem Collections
4. Poetic Forms

Collections of Classic Poems

Our library of classic poems by the great poets: William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, and more.

• Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Poems by Robert Burns
• Poems by George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Poems by Robert Frost
• Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• Poems by William Wordsworth
• Poems by William Butler Yeats

Study Guides for Classic Poems

Notes on context, content, and form to help you understand how these great poems work their magic.

• Burning Questions: A Guide to William Blake's "The Tyger"
• Dreaming of Xanadu: A Guide to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
• The "Tricky" Poem: A Guide to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

• Allen Ginsberg's American Sentences
• Memory and Nature: A Guide to William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
• Things Fall Apart: A Guide to W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"

Theme Poem Collections

Our anthologies of classic and contemporary poems gathered by topic, theme, season or occasion.

• Love Poems: A collection of classic poems for Valentine's Day
• Spring Poems
• Poems for Election Day: A selection of American poems
• Poems for Peace: A contemporary About Poetry anthology
• Poems of War: A collection of classic war poems
• Winter Poems
• Poems for Thanksgiving Day: A selection of American poems

• Christmas Poems: A collection of classic poems for Christmas
• Poems for Mothers: A collection of classic poems for Mother's Day
• Poems for Fathers: A collection of classic poems for Father's Day
• Summer Poems
• Poems for Independence Day: A selection of American poems for July 4th
• Poems After the Attack: A "contemporaneous" 9/11 anthology
• Halloween Poems

Poetic Forms

Descriptions and examples of the traditional poetic forms, as well as our articles on newly invented forms of poetry.

• A Glossary of Poetic Forms
• Concrete Poetry/VisPo: Poems Take Shape on the Screen
• Fibonacci Poems: A New Mathematical Form, by Georgia Luna Smith Faust
• Sparrow's Mathemetrics Spree