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
The Poems of Catullus
54 BC · 359 pages
Latin love poetry begins with Catullus, counting kisses by the thousand for the aristocrat he calls Lesbia and then admitting he hates and loves her at once. The obscenity still stings.
★ 7.4
The Essential Rumi
1273 · 302 pages
Grief for a wandering dervish named Shams turned Rumi into a poet of longing for God. His great Masnavi opens with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from.
★ 7.4
The Prose Edda
1220 · 180 pages
A Swedish king walks into a hall and asks three strangers how the world began and how it ends. Their answers are nearly all anyone now knows about Thor, Loki, and Ragnarok.
★ 7.3
Inferno
1321 · 296 pages
Lost in a dark wood, Dante follows the Roman poet Virgil down through nine circles, past lovers, popes, and traitors frozen in ice. Every punishment is built to answer its sin.
★ 7.3
Theogony and Works and Days
700 BC · 79 pages
Chaos comes first, then gods who overthrow their fathers in turn until Zeus wins and holds. Hesiod then turns to his idle brother to explain when to plow and why work is holy.
★ 7.2
The Book of Songs
Author unknown
600 BC · 400 pages
Three hundred and five songs from ancient China about courtship, harvest, soldiers on campaign, and bad government. Confucius taught from them, and every Chinese poet since has written with them in earshot.
★ 7.2
Selected Poems
1850 · 352 pages
Daffodils, a solitary reaper singing in a field, and a valley revisited after five years: Wordsworth wrote these in ordinary speech and found that remembering keeps remaking the person who remembers.
★ 7.2
The Major Works
1744 · 768 pages
Pope wrote couplets that turned into proverbs, including "to err is human, to forgive divine." He built a mock epic around a stolen lock of hair and shredded his enemies in verse.
★ 7.1
Shahnameh
977 · 1040 pages
Fifty thousand couplets carry Iran from creation to the Arab conquest, past a tyrant with snakes growing from his shoulders and the hero Rostam meeting a young champion he does not recognize.
★ 7.1
The Complete Poems
1966 · 908 pages
Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.
★ 7.1
The Satires
100 · 320 pages
Bread and circuses came from here, and so did the line about guarding the guards. Juvenal turns sixteen poems of fury on imperial Rome, where an honest man cannot afford to live.
★ 7.0
The Major Works
1822 · 880 pages
Shelley put atheism, revolution, and free love into lines nobody has matched for sheer music. In "Ozymandias" a tyrant's boast survives as two stone legs and a shattered face in empty sand.
★ 7.0
A Season in Hell
1873 · 103 pages
Nine sections of prose delirium in which Rimbaud, eighteen years old, arraigns his ancestry, his damnation, and his own attempt to derange the senses into vision. Modernism starts in this voice.
★ 7.0
The Odes of Pindar
470 BC · 186 pages
Water is best, the first ode opens, then praises a Sicilian king whose horse won at Olympia. Pindar makes athletic victory an occasion for myth and for warnings about mortal limits.
★ 7.0
Selected Verse
1936 · 405 pages
Lorca's poems rise from Andalusian folk song and dream logic, where the moon walks into a forge and knives are always waiting. His lament for a gored bullfighter tolls five in the afternoon.
★ 6.9
Selected Poems
1938 · 167 pages
Dense, classical, and packed with Petersburg stone and Black Sea light, from a poet the state killed for sixteen lines about Stalin. His widow saved them by memorizing every one.
★ 6.9
Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore
1941 · 208 pages
Tagore wrote the songs that became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. His Bengali lyrics address God as a lover who is late, plainly and without a trace of religious machinery.
★ 6.9
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
1798 · 76 pages
Stopped outside a wedding, a guest must hear an old sailor out: he shot an albatross for no reason, and the ship fell becalmed with water everywhere and none to drink.
★ 6.8
Selected Poetry
1837 · 288 pages
Pushkin's clerk in "The Bronze Horseman" loses everything to a flood, curses the tsar's statue, and is chased by it through Petersburg. Every Russian writer since has worked inside the language he made.
★ 6.7
If Not, Winter
Fragments of Sappho
600 BC · 416 pages
Western love poetry starts with Sappho, and starts at full pitch: the tongue breaks, thin fire runs under the skin. The poet Anne Carson brackets every gap where the papyrus tore.
★ 6.7
The Song of Roland
Author unknown
1115 · 224 pages
Charlemagne's rearguard is ambushed in a Pyrenean pass, and Roland will not blow his horn for help until his temples burst. Four centuries later Italian poets were still writing epics about him.
★ 6.6
The Nibelungenlied
Author unknown
1200 · 403 pages
Siegfried, invulnerable but for one spot the dragon's blood missed, is speared there by Hagen. Kriemhild's revenge for her husband runs through the rest of Germany's national epic and empties two courts.
★ 6.6
Cold Mountain Poems
800 · 256 pages
A recluse calling himself Cold Mountain scratched more than three hundred poems onto rocks in Tang China, plain about hunger, cold, and the folly of ambition. Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him.
★ 6.6
Layli and Majnun
1192 · 320 pages
Qays, an Arab poet, loves Layli so openly that his tribe calls him Majnun, the possessed, and her father marries her elsewhere. Poets from Anatolia to Mughal India rewrote Nezami's version for centuries.
★ 6.5
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
1924 · 60 pages
Neruda was nineteen when these poems appeared, mapping a woman's body onto hills, water, and dusk with a directness that startled readers. Millions of copies later, they are the best-selling poetry in Spanish.
★ 6.5
The Romance of the Rose
1275 · 350 pages
Courtly love as siege warfare: a dreamer enters a garden, and Jean de Meun's vast continuation spends twenty thousand lines besieging one rosebud. Christine de Pizan's attack on it started a centuries-long argument.
★ 6.5
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
1967 · 717 pages
Hughes wrote the blues into American poetry, plain-spoken and syncopated. He asked what happens to a dream deferred, and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry built A Raisin in the Sun from his answer.
★ 6.3
Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997
1998 · 273 pages
Forty years of poems that begin with an ordinary question and end somewhere you never agreed to go. In "Cat in an Empty Apartment," a cat waits for the owner who has died.
★ 5.9
Selected Poems of Victor Hugo
1885 · 664 pages
Hugo was the largest voice in French poetry, and the range astonishes: political fury from exile against Napoleon III, and “Demain, dès l'aube,” a walk that ends at his drowned daughter's grave.
★ 5.8
Selected Poems
1918 · 320 pages
Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine runs on and the love does not. Apollinaire brought the machine age and the trenches into French verse, and coined the word that named surrealism.
★ 5.7
Dark Elderberry Branch
2012 · 80 pages
No more passionate voice ever sounded in twentieth-century Russian poetry, the poet Brodsky said of Tsvetaeva. She came back from exile to Stalin's Russia, where the secret police took her husband and daughter.
★ 5.5
Lunch Poems
1964 · 76 pages
O'Hara wrote these on lunch breaks from the museum, turning an ordinary Manhattan hour into art. "The Day Lady Died" runs through his errands until Billie Holiday's face on a newspaper stops everything.
★ 5.5
Selected Poems 1988-2013
2013 · 240 pages
Heaney's late poems turn from politics toward light and air. He writes his parents' deaths and his own stroke, and in "Postscript" an Atlantic wind off the Flaggy Shore blows the heart open.
★ 5.5
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics)
1896 · 368 pages
Music before everything else, Verlaine demanded, and wrote French verse so hushed composers could not leave it alone. Rain on the town becomes weeping in the heart, with no reason given.
★ 5.4
The Peace of Wild Things
2018 · 134 pages
When despair for the world wakes him at night, Berry goes down to the water where the heron feeds. Decades of farming one Kentucky hillside stand behind these poems of grief and consolation.
★ 5.4
Azaleas
1925 · 320 pages
A woman watches her lover go and promises to scatter azaleas in his path rather than weep. Kim Sowol put Korean folk-song rhythm into modern verse, and the whole country memorized him.
★ 5.4