The Iliad
750 BC · 848 pages
Achilles withdraws from the fighting over a stolen prize and his friends die outside Troy for it. Nothing written about war since has matched Homer's fury, or the mercy of the final scene.
★ 9.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Odyssey
700 BC · 592 pages
Ten years of storms, monsters, and a goddess who will not let him go stand between a soldier and his own front door. Every adventure story since descends from Odysseus.
★ 9.9
The Divine Comedy
1321 · 798 pages
No poem has reached higher. Dante goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the light of God, settling scores with real Florentines and arriving where Beatrice waits.
★ 9.8
Aeneid
19 BC · 484 pages
Aeneas carries his father out of burning Troy and is sent to found Rome, abandoning the queen who loves him. Duty wins, and Dido's grief is the greatest passage in Latin poetry.
★ 9.5
Paradise Lost
1667 · 591 pages
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
★ 9.5
The Waste Land
1922 · 234 pages
April is the cruellest month, and from that line Eliot assembles a ruined Europe out of voices, tarot cards, and pub talk. The fragments lodge in the memory for good.
★ 9.4
Leaves of Grass
1855 · 703 pages
Whitman threw out rhyme and meter to write the body, the country, and himself at full voice. In "Song of Myself" he speaks straight at you, delighted that you finally showed up.
★ 9.3
The Collected Poems
1939 · 544 pages
Irish myth and fairy tale at the start, then old age, politics, and desire handled with frightening force. Yeats wrote things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and a terrible beauty is born.
★ 9.1
The Essential Emily Dickinson
1886 · 112 pages
Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems in a Massachusetts bedroom, on death, God, and her own mind, and remade the English lyric. Begin with "Because I could not stop for Death."
★ 8.9
The Collected Poems
1954 · 583 pages
Stevens sold insurance in Hartford and wrote sumptuous poems about what the imagination makes once God is gone. Read "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" aloud and the sound arrives before the sense.
★ 8.6
The Collected Poems
1963 · 296 pages
Frost's New England of stone walls and deep snow arrives in plain talk held to strict meter, with something much colder underneath. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening offers no comfort.
★ 8.6
Metamorphoses
8 · 764 pages
Ovid runs classical myth through a single idea, transformation, from the creation of the world to Julius Caesar. Girls become trees and hunters become deer, and painters have ransacked him for centuries.
★ 8.6
The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)
1857 · 399 pages
Modern poetry starts here, in gorgeous verse about boredom, rot, and the crowds of Paris. Baudelaire opens by calling the reader his hypocrite brother, then makes ugliness beautiful.
★ 8.5
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
1789 · 155 pages
Short poems in simple meter about lambs, chimney sweeps, and a tiger burning in the forests of the night. Blake sets an innocent version beside a bitter one and lets you decide.
★ 8.2
Poems
1979 · 352 pages
Bishop looks at a fish, a filling station, a moose in the road, and never tells you what to feel. In "One Art" she calls losing things an art you can master.
★ 7.8
On the Nature of Things
55 BC · 304 pages
Everything is atoms falling through empty space, Lucretius argues in Latin verse, your soul included, and it dies when your body does. He wrote the poem to cure his readers of fearing death.
★ 7.6
Gilgamesh
Author unknown
1700 BC · 304 pages
Literature begins here. Gilgamesh bullies his city until the gods send a wild man to match him. They become friends, one dies, and grief drives the survivor to the end of the world.
★ 7.5
The Odes of Horace
23 BC · 200 pages
Horace compresses wine, friendship, and the certainty of death into stanzas of exact and unhurried form, the summit of Latin lyric. Carpe diem is his line, and in context it is not cheerful.
★ 7.5
Beowulf
Author unknown
1000 · 213 pages
For twelve years a monster has emptied a Danish king's hall, until a young warrior sails over to wait for it in the dark. Fifty years on, the poem comes back for him.
★ 7.4
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author unknown
1375 · 198 pages
At Arthur's Christmas court a huge green man offers his neck to anyone willing to take the same blow a year later. Gawain swings, and the real test waits in a bedroom.
★ 7.4