Academic Team Lit- Poems

This is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a distraught lover who is paid a visit by a mysterious raven that repeatedly speaks a single word. The lover, often identified as a student,^[1][2] is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further antagonize the protagonist with its repetition of the word "nevermore". The poem makes use of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

The Raven

This is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly,^[1] and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection, Mountain Interval. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, both literally and figuratively, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and potentially divergent.

The Road Not Taken

This is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner^[2] of London. The poem was created as part of a friendly competition in which Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith each created a poem on the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II

Ozymandias

This is a poem by English poet Rudyard Kipling , written circa 1895 as a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson. It is a literary example of Victorian-era values. The poem, first published in Rewards and Fairies (1910) following the story "Brother Square-Toes", is written in the form of paternal advice to the poet's son, John.

If

(also sometimes called "Daffodils"^[2]) is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth.^[3] It is one of his most popular, and was inspired by an encounter on 15 April 1802 during a walk with his younger sister Dorothy, when they saw a "long belt" of daffodils on the shore of Ullswater in the English Lake District.^[4] Written in 1804,^[5] this 24-line lyric was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and revised in 1815.^[6]

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils)

This sonnet also known as "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by English poet and playwright William Shakespeare.

In the sonnet, the speaker asks whether he should compare the Fair Youth to a summer's day, but notes that he has qualities that surpass a summer's day, which is one of the themes of the poem. He also notes the qualities of a summer day are subject to change and will eventually diminish.

Sonnet 18

This is a lyrical poem by Emily Dickinson first published posthumously in Poems: Series 1 in 1890. Dickinson's work was never authorized to be published, so it is unknown whether the poem was completed or "abandoned".^[1] The speaker of Dickinson's poem meets personified Death. Death is a gentleman who is riding in the horse carriage that picks up the speaker in the poem and takes the speaker on her journey to the afterlife. According to Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition of 1955 the number of this poem is "712".

Because i could not stop for death

This poem written in 1850 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, appears in the collection Sonnets from the Portuguese. It explores themes of love that are Boundless and eternal, even before and after death.

How Do I Love Thee

This is a poem in the form of a villanelle by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and is one of his best-known works.^[1] Though first published in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951,^[2] Thomas wrote the poem in 1947 while visiting Florence with his family. The poem was subsequently included, alongside other works by Thomas, in In Country Sleep, and Other Poems. It has been suggested that the poem was written for Thomas's dying father, although he did not die until just before Christmas in 1952. It has no title other than its first line. A line that appears as a refrain throughout the poem along with its other refrain, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light".

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

This is the first professionally published poem by the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot. It relates the varying thoughts of its title character in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing it in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This is a poem by John Keats, one of his 1819 odes. It was written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London, or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.

Ode to a Nightingale

When Henley was 16 years old, his left leg required amputation below the knee owing to complications arising from tuberculosis.^[1]: 16 In the early 1870s, after seeking treatment for problems with his other leg at Margate, he was told that it would require a similar procedure.^[2] He instead chose to travel to Edinburgh in August 1873 to enlist the services of the distinguished English surgeon Joseph Lister, who was able to save Henley's remaining leg after multiple surgical interventions on the foot.^[4] While recovering in the infirmary, he was moved to write the verses that became this poem. A memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism—the "stiff upper lip" of self-discipline and fortitude in adversity, which popular culture rendered into a British character trait remains a cultural touchstone.

Invictus