Most bookshelves hold at least one poetry book that has never been opened past the first few pages. It might be a gift, a college assignment, or a purchase made in a burst of ambition. The spine looks great, and the bookmark hasn’t moved in years.
Poetry rarely asks to be read like a novel, which is part of the reason so many collections stay half finished. Here are nine well known books that often sit unread, along with a few facts that might make you pick one up again.
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The first edition appeared in 1855 and was self published, with only twelve poems. Whitman kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life, so the book you own depends on which edition you bought. The final version, often called the deathbed edition, dates to the early 1890s.
Many readers stop after “Song of Myself,” which is the famous centerpiece. The later sections, including the Civil War poems gathered in Drum-Taps, reward patience. Reading it front to back shows a poet changing his mind about what a poem could be.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Published in 1922, the poem runs to 434 lines, so finishing it isn’t really a question of length. The difficulty comes from its shifting voices, foreign language fragments, and dense allusions. Eliot added notes to the poem, and those notes have puzzled readers almost as much as the verse itself.
Ezra Pound heavily edited the manuscript, cutting it down from a longer draft. Many owners bounce off it after a page or two. An annotated edition, read once for sound and once for sense, makes it far more approachable.
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Dickinson wrote close to eighteen hundred poems, and only a small handful appeared in print while she was alive. Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of 1955 was a landmark, and R. W. Franklin’s 1998 edition presented 1,789 poems in a new arrangement. A complete volume is more than most people want to read in one go.
The short lines and slant rhymes make each poem look easy. Yet reading dozens in a row can feel like eating only spice. Most readers do better with a few poems per sitting over several weeks.
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Ariel came out in 1965, after Plath’s death in 1963, and it made her a lasting name in American poetry. In 2004, a restored edition arrived with a foreword by her daughter, Frieda Hughes, presenting the poems in the order Plath had intended. Many people own one version and have never compared the two.
Readers tend to know a handful of poems, such as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” The full book has a quieter arc, including bee poems and moments of lyric calm. Reading it in sequence changes how the famous pieces land.
Partner offer
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
City Lights published this slim volume in 1956, and it became the center of an obscenity trial in 1957. The judge ruled that the work was not obscene, which helped cement its reputation. That story is better known than the rest of the book.
Plenty of owners have read the title poem and skipped what follows. The other pieces, including “A Supermarket in California” and “Sunflower Sutra,” show a gentler side of Ginsberg. The whole book is short enough to finish in an evening.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
Neruda published this collection in 1924, when he was still a young poet. It has stayed in print in many languages, and it turns up on shelves as a romantic gift. Fewer people move on from the best known love poems to the closing song of despair.
Translation matters here. Different English versions vary in tone, so a bilingual edition can help if you know any Spanish. The book is brief, but it reads best slowly, one poem at a time.
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Knopf published The Prophet in 1923, and it has been translated into a very large number of languages. It’s technically a book of prose poems, organized as a series of talks on subjects like love, work, and death. It’s often given at weddings and funerals, which means many copies are opened only for a single chapter.
Reading straight through reveals a structure. A traveler is about to leave the city of Orphalese, and townspeople ask him for parting wisdom. The individual sections are short, but the accumulated tone is meant to build.
Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
The 1954 volume won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955, and it also earned a National Book Award. It gathers work from across Stevens’ career, including the early book Harmonium. At several hundred pages, it looks like a commitment, and it is.
Stevens writes about imagination and reality in abstract language, which some readers find chilly. His imagery is vivid enough, though, and poems like “The Snow Man” work as short entry points. Reading the book in chronological chunks makes the shape of his career clearer.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
This anthology has gone through multiple editions and has been a fixture of college courses for decades. It covers centuries of English language verse, from medieval lyrics to contemporary poems. Almost nobody reads it from the first page to the last, because it was built as a reference and a classroom tool.
Still, it’s one of the easiest books to explore without a plan. Choose a century, read a dozen poets, and see who stays with you. A reader who does that for a year will have covered more ground than most people who own it.
Partner offer
Planning a trip to Vegas?
Compare hotel rates and show tickets on VEGAS.com.
