Nathaniel Hawthorne / My Kinsman, Major Mollineux
Stephen Crane / The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Ernest Hemingway / A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Frank O'Connor / My Oedipus Complex
Flannery O'Connor / Good Country People
Toni Cade Bambara / The Lesson
William Wordsworth / It Is a Beauteous Evening
John Keats / On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Robert Browning / My Last Duches
Gerard Manley Hopkins / Spring and Fall
A.E. Housman / Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
William Butler Yeats / Adam's Curse
Stevie Smith / To Carry the Child
Countee Cullen / Incident
Phyllis McGinley / Country Club Sunday
Josephine Jacobsen / Tears
Alastair Reid / Curiosity
W.D. Snodgrass / April Inventory
X.J. Kennedy / First Confession
Peter Meinke / Advice to My Son
Robert Wallace / In a Spring Still Not Written Of
June Jordan / A Poem About Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters
David Kirby / The Last Song on the Jukebox
George Orwell / Shooting an Elephant
Roger Wilkins / Confessions of a Blue-Chip Black
Joan Didion / Marrying Absurd
Richard Rodriquez / Going Home Again: The New American Scholarship Boy
Herman Melville / Bartleby the Scrivener
Thomas Mann / Gladius Dei
James Thurber / The Greatest Man in the World
Shirley Jackson / The Lottery
Ursula K. Le Guin / The One Who Walk Away from Omelas
Donald Barthelme / The Sandman
Harlan Ellison / "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
Alice Walker / Everyday Use
John Milton / Sonnet XVII "When I consider how my light is spent"
William Wordsworth / The World Is Too Much with Us
Edgar Allan Poe / Sonnet: To Science
Alfred, Lord Tennyson / Ulysses
Emily Dickinson / Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
William Butler Yeats / Easter
Edwin Arlington Robinson / Miniver Cheevy
Paul Laurence Dunbar / We Wear the Mask
Robert Frost / Departmental
Wallace Stevens / Sunday Morning
Claude McKay / If We Must Die
E.E. Cummings / The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
W.H. Auden / The Unknown Citizen
Helen Sorrells / From a Correct Address in a Suburb of a Major city
Karl Shapiro / The Conscientious Objector
Henry Reed / Naming of Parts
Gwendolyn Brooks / The Children of the Poor
Lawrence Ferlinghetti / In Goya's Greatest Scenes
Philip Larkin / Poetry of Departures
Donald W. Baker / Formal Application
Etheridge Knight / Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane // Rosmarie Waldrop / Confession to Settle a Curse
Carolyn Forche / The Colonel
Henrik Isben / A Doll's House
Jonathan Swift / A Modest Proposal
Virginia Woolf / What if Shakespeare Had Had a Sister?
Martin Luther King, Jr. / Letter from Birmingham Jail
Tom Wolfe / The Right Stuff
D.H. Lawrence / The Horse Dealer's Daughter
William Faulkner / Dry September
Alberto Moravia / The Chase
Irwin Shaw / The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
Bobbie Ann Mason / Shiloh
Anonymous / Bonny Barbara Allan
Michael Drayton / Since There's No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part
Christopher Marlowe / The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Sir Walter Ralegh / The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
William Shakespear / Sonet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
Sonet 129 "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame"
Sonnet 130 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
John Donne / A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Edmund Waller / Go, Lovely Rose!
Andrew Marvell / To His Coy Mistress
William Blake / A Poison Tree
Robert Burns / A Red, Red Rose
Walt Whitman / From Song of Myself
Matthew Arnold / Dover Beach
Emily Dickinson / Mine Enemy Is Growing Old
Gerard Manley Hopkins / Pied Beauty
Robert Frost / Fire and Ice
T.S. Eliot / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Edna St. Vincent Millay / Love Is Not All
E.E. Cummings / if everything happens that can't be done
W. H. Auden / From five Songs
Theodore Roethke / I Knew a Woman
Elizabeth Bishop / One Art
Robert Hayden / Those Winter Sundays
Anthony Hecht / The Dover Bitch
Denise Levertov / The Ache of Marriage
Anne Sexton / The Farmer's Wife
Adrienne Rich / Living in Sin
Ted Hughes / Crow's First Lesson
Kathleen Cushman / Brothers and Sisters
William Shakespeare / Othello
Katherine Anne Porter / The Necessary Enemy
James Thurber / Courtship Through the Ages / Lewis Thomas / the Iks
Ellen Goodman / Being Loved Anyway
Leo Tolstoy / The Death of Ivan Ilych
Ambrose Bierce / An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Katherine Anne Porter / The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Arna Bontemps / A Summer Tragedy
Bernard Malamud / Idiots First
William Shakespeare / sonnet 73 " That time of year thou mayst in me behold"
John Donne / Death, Be Not Proud
Thomas Gray / Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Geroge Gordon, Lord Byron / The Destruction of Sennacherib
Percy Bysshe Shelley / Ozymandias
John Keats / Ode on a Grecian Urn
Emily Dickinson / After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
Apparently with No Surprise
A.E. House / To an Athlete Dying Young
William Butler Yeats / Sailing to Byzantium
Edwin Arlington Robinson / Richard Cory
Robert Frost / After Apple-Picking
William Carlos Williams / Tract
John Crowe Ransom / Bells for John Whiteside Daughter
Wilfred Owen / Dulce et Decorum Est
E.E. Cummings / Nobody loses all the time
W.H. Auden / In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Theodore Rotheke / Elegy for Jane
Richard Wright / Between the World and Me
Dylan Thomas / Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Randall Jarrell / The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Catherine Davis / After a Time
Mazine Kumin / Woodchucks
Allen Ginsberg / To Aunt Rose
Edwin Brock / Five Ways to Kill a Man
W.S. Merwin / For the Anniversary of My Death / Yevgeny Yevtushenko / People
Mary Gordon / The Dead Ladies
Arthur Kopit / End of the World
John Donne / Mediatation XVII
E. B. White / Once More to the Lake
Jessica Mitford / The American Way of Death
Richard Selzer / The Discus Thrower
Alice Walker / To Hell with Dying