The Mentor Book of Major American Poets

Table of Contents

Introduction

Edward Taylor (1645-1729)
The Preface Our Insufficiency to Praise God Suitably for His Mercy Housewifery Am I Thy Gold? Or Purse, Lord, for Thy Wealth Thy Human Frame, My Glorious Lord, I Spy I Kenning through Astronomy Divine The Accusation of the Inward Man Upon a Spider Catching a Fly The Outward Man Accused The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended An Address to the Soul Occasioned by a Rain Stupendous Love! All Saints' Astonishment!
Oh! What a Thing Is Man? Lord, Who Am I?
Still I Complain; I Am Complaining Still Should I with Silver Tools Delve through the Hill The Reflection

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Concord Hymn Brahma The Rhodora The Humblebee Each and All The Problem Woodnotes The Snowstorm Fable Days Saadi Hamatreya Experience Compensation Forbearance The Past Ode Give All to Love Terminus Good-bye

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Hymn to the Night The Day Is Done Curfew The Jewish Cemetery at Newport My Lost Youth The Birds of Killingworth Divina Commedia The Fire of Driftwood Chaucer The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls The Cross of Snow The Bells of San Blas The Arrow and the Song Possibilities The Ropewalk
from Evangeline
from The Song of Hiawatha

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Dreams A Dream within a Dream
"The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour"
Sonnet - To Science Romance To Helen Israfel The City in the Sea The Sleeper To One in Paradise The Haunted Palace Sonnet - Silence The Conqueror Worm Dreamland The Raven The Bells Ulalume - A Ballad Eldorado For Annie Annabel Lee The Lake: To —
Alone

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Song of Myself (Complete)
Native Moments Earth, My Likeness Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking I Sit and Look Out Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night Reconciliation When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed O Captain! My Captain!
To Think of Time Joy, Shipmate, Joy!
Good-bye My Fancy!

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Success Is Counted Sweetest One Dignity Delays for All New Feet within My Garden Go Surgeons Must Be Very Careful Faith Is a Fine Invention Hope Is the Thing with Feathers I Should Not Dare to Leave My Friend I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed There's a Certain Slant of Light I Felt a Funeral in My Brain I'm Nobody. Who Are You?
The Soul Selects Her Own Society I Should Have Been Too Glad, I See Before I Got My Eye Put Out A Bird Came Down the Walk I Dreaded That First Robin So No Rack Can Torture Me There's Been a Death in the Opposite House What Soft Cherubic Creatures Much Madness Is Divinest Sense The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man This Is My Letter to the World I Died for Beauty I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died It Was Not Death, for I Stood Up I Started Early, Took My Dog The Heart Asks Pleasure First I Had Been Hungry All the Years I Laughed a Crumbling Laugh Because I Could Not Stop for Death A Narrow Fellow in the Grass The Sky Is Low, the Clouds Are Mean I Never Saw a Moor The Last Night That She Lived While We Were Fearing It, It Came There Came a Wind Like a Bugle Of God We Ask One Favor My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close The Distance That the Dead Have Gone The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise

Edwin Arlington Robison (1869-1935)
Flammonde Luke Havergal Charles Carville's Eyes Reuben Bright Richard Cory John Evereldown Aaron Stark Fleming Helphenstine Cliff Klingenhagen George Crabbe Credo Bewick Finzer Many Are Called New England The Miller's Wife As It Looked Then Another Dark Lady
"If the Lord Would Make Windows in Heaven"
Recalled Haunted House A Mighty Runner The Story of the Ashes and the Flame Hillcrest Eros Turannos Mr. Flood's Party Cassandra

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
In the Desert A God in Wrath I Saw a Man Pursuing Behold, the Grave Many Workmen A Learned Man Came to Me Once There Was Set beore Me a Mighty Hill A Youth in Apparel That Glittered There Was One I Met A Man Saw a Ball of Gold On the Horizon I Walked in a Desert Tradition, Thou Art for Suckling Children Many Red Devils You Say You Are Holy
"It Was Wrong to Do This"
A Man Feared The Sage Lectured God Lay Dead War Is Kind A Little Ink More or Less Fast Rode the Knight A Newspaper The Wayfarer A Slant of Sun The Impact of a Dollar Ay, Workman There Was a Man with Tongue of Wood I Stood upon a High Place

Robert Frost (b. 1874)
Mending Wall After Apple Picking The Oven Bird Birches The Subverted Flower The Gift Outright To Earthward Tree at My Window Two Tramps in Mud Time The Witch of Coös Once by the Pacific Acquainted with the Night On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening The Road Not Taken Neither Out Far nor in Deep The Vantage Point The Tuft of Flowers Directive

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
The Leaden-Eyed The Unpardonable Sin Simon Legree - A Negro Sermon The Eagle That Is Forgotten The Bronco That Would Not Be Broken The Ghosts of the Buffaloes Factory Windows Are Always Broken The Pontoon-Bridge Miracle Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan General William Booth Enters into Heaven The Congo Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Peter Quince at the Clavier Sunday Morning Le Monocle de Mon Oncle Flyer's Fall Men Made Out of Words The Glass of Water Anecdote of the Jar The Emperor of Ice Cream Dry Loaf To the One of Fictive Music Bantams in Pine Woods The Idea of Order at Key West A Postcard from the Volcano Cuisine Bourgeoisie Poetry Is a Destructive Force The Poems of Our Climate Martial Cadenza The Dwarf No Possum, No Sop, No Taters Esthétique du Mal The Good Man Has No Shape Credences of Summer Two Things of Opposite Natures Seem to Depend To an Old Philosopher in Rome Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself Crude Foyer

William Carlos Williams (b. 1883)
The Yachts To a Poor Old Woman The Sea Elephant Lear These Burning the Christmas Greens The Dance On Gay Wallpaper The Pure Products of America By the Road to the Contagious Hospital Queen-Ann's-Lace Tract Six Poems from Paterson

Ezra Pound (b. 1885)
Na Audiart Ballad of the Goodly Fere Portrait d'une Femme A Virginal The Return Tenzone Salutation A Pact The Rest The Temperaments In a Station of the Metro The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
from Homage to Sextus Propertius Canto I Canto II Canto III Canto XVII Canto XLV Canto LXXXI

Marianne Moore (b. 1887)
No Swan So Fine The Fish In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good and Critics and Connoisseurs The Monkeys In the Days of Prismatic Colour England A Grave The Labours of Hercules To a Steam Roller To a Snail To the Peacock of France The Past Is the Present What Are Years?
Spenser's Ireland Nevertheless The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing In Distrust of Merits

John Crowe Ransom (b. 1888)
Winter Remembered Necrological Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter Dead Boy Good Ships Emily Hardcastle, Spinster Here Lies a Lady Conrad in Twilight Armageddon Judith of Bethulia Blue Girls Old Man Playing with Children Captain Carpenter Old Mansion Piazza Piece Vision by Sweetwater Her Eyes Parting, without a Sequel Janet Waking Two in August Our Two Worthies Man without Sense of Direction Survey of Literature The Equilibrists Painted Head Address to the Scholars of New England

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Renascence Dirge without Music Spring The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver Moriturus Recuerdo The Cameo Lament Elegy Before Death The Return Conscientious Objector Oh, Think Not I Am Faithless to a Vow!
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear Not with Libations, But with Shouts and Laughter And You As Well Must Die, Beloved Dust Pity Me Not Because the Light of Day I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare To Jesus on His Birthday On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink

Archibald MacLeish (b.1892)
The Silent Slain Eleven Ars Poetica You, Andrew Marvell The End of the World Memorial Rain
"Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments"
Pony Rock Pole Star for This Year Poem in Prose What Any Lover Learns The Steamboat Whistle Starved Lovers What the Serpent Said to Adam Vicissitudes of the Creator My Naked Aunt The Genius Reasons for Music

e. e. cummings (b. 1894)
Spring is like a perhaps hand darling!because my blood can sing when serpents bargain for the right to squirm i thank You God for most this amazing all ignorance toboggans into know maggie and milly and molly and may so shy shy shy(and with a in time of daffodils(who know if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have Mouse)Won that melancholy Thanksgiving whatever's merely wilful stand with your lover on the ending earth i am a little church(no great cathedral)
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in if up's the word;and a world grows greener what if a much of a which of a wind no man,if men are gods;but if gods must i sing of Olaf glad and big a man who had fallen among thieves
"next to of course god america i anyone lived in a pretty how town pity this busy monster,manunkind my father moved through dooms of love

Hart Crane (1899-1932)
The Bridge (Complete)
Black Tambourine Emblems of Conduct Praise for an Urn Garden Abstract Stark Major Voyages, I to VI The Broken Tower Repose of Rivers

W. H. Auden (b.1907)
Musée des Beaux Arts The Unknown Citizen Petition The Composer In Memory of W. B. Yeats Herman Melville Something Is Bound to Happen The Diaspora The Novelist The Climbers Another Time Who's Who Macao O What Is That Sound O Where Are You Going Mundus et Infans The Chimeras Words Epitaph on a Tyrant Narrator

Notes on the Poets Index