Poem Guides

This poem finds its author not raving but frowning.

The incinerating vision of this Plath classic.

The creation of life and the masterful merging of metaphor and reality.

A hymn to female independence in the form of a withering critique of marriage

Touch, risk, trust, improvisation—“the intellect as powerhouse of love.”

After the poet lost his wife, he found his voice.

Silence and speech in post-war France

How a poem brings language to loss and speaks to the dead.

A poet revisits his legendary teacher’s advice.

A long-lost meditation on heartbreak and pain.

The first great flight of a Modernist legend.

The chilly heart of a whimsical poem

Exploring the spiritual in the great master's ode to architecture.

The young poet shows the first stirrings of genius.

A reluctant soldier responds to mass tragedy.

How the conflict of a nation was captured by a politically reluctant poet.

Just what does depend on that old wheelbarrow, anyway?

A poem from the Great Depression reveals the egalitarian nature of pleasure—and the formal innovation of a modernist master.

What happens when metaphor meets a monument?