100 Famous English Poems of All Time

Poetry is one of the oldest and most powerful forms of human expression. Long before novels, films, or even newspapers, people used poems to tell stories, express love, question life, protest injustice, and search for meaning. From Shakespeare’s immortal sonnets to Maya Angelou’s voices of resistance, English poetry has shaped the way generations think, feel, and speak.

This list of 100 Famous English Poems of All Time brings together the most influential, widely read, and culturally significant poems across centuries — from the Renaissance to the modern age. These are poems that changed literature, inspired movements, and continue to be quoted, studied, and loved around the world.

  1. Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) — William Shakespeare (1609)
  2. Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds) — William Shakespeare (1609)
  3. Paradise Lost (Book I) — John Milton (1667)
  4. To His Coy Mistress — Andrew Marvell (1681)
  5. The Flea — John Donne (1633)
  6. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning — John Donne (1611)
  7. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard — Thomas Gray (1751)
  8. The Tyger — William Blake (1794)
  9. The Lamb — William Blake (1789)
  10. Ozymandias — Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
  11. Ode to a Nightingale — John Keats (1819)
  12. Ode on a Grecian Urn — John Keats (1819)
  13. To Autumn — John Keats (1819)
  14. She Walks in Beauty — Lord Byron (1814)
  15. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) — William Wordsworth (1807)
  16. Tintern Abbey — William Wordsworth (1798)
  17. Kubla Khan — Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)
  18. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — Coleridge (1798)
  19. Ode to the West Wind — Shelley (1819)
  20. When We Were Young — A. E. Housman (1896)
  21. Ulysses — Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842)
  22. The Charge of the Light Brigade — Tennyson (1854)
  23. Dover Beach — Matthew Arnold (1867)
  24. Because I could not stop for Death — Emily Dickinson (1890)
  25. Hope is the thing with feathers — Emily Dickinson (1891)
  26. If— — Rudyard Kipling (1895)
  27. Invictus — William Ernest Henley (1875)
  28. My Last Duchess — Robert Browning (1842)
  29. Sonnet 43 (How do I love thee?) — Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
  30. The Lady of Shalott — Tennyson (1833)
  31. The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost (1916)
  32. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening — Robert Frost (1923)
  33. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas (1951)
  34. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978)
  35. Phenomenal Woman — Maya Angelou (1978)
  36. Howl — Allen Ginsberg (1956)
  37. The Waste Land — T. S. Eliot (1922)
  38. The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)
  39. Annabel Lee — Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
  40. The Raven — Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
  41. Song of Myself — Walt Whitman (1855)
  42. O Captain! My Captain! — Walt Whitman (1865)
  43. Prufrock — T. S. Eliot (1915)
  44. Daddy — Sylvia Plath (1965)
  45. Ariel — Sylvia Plath (1965)
  46. Funeral Blues — W. H. Auden (1936)
  47. September 1, 1939 — W. H. Auden (1939)
  48. If You Forget Me — Pablo Neruda (1952, Eng. trans.)
  49. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — T. S. Eliot (1915)
  50. In Flanders Fields — John McCrae (1915)
  51. The Ballad of Reading Gaol — Oscar Wilde (1898)
  52. Desiderata — Max Ehrmann (1927)
  53. This Be The Verse — Philip Larkin (1971)
  54. High Windows — Philip Larkin (1974)
  55. The Tyger — William Blake (1794) (re-listed often but kept unique in history)
  56. The Darkling Thrush — Thomas Hardy (1900)
  57. Not Waving but Drowning — Stevie Smith (1957)
  58. One Art — Elizabeth Bishop (1976)
  59. The New Colossus — Emma Lazarus (1883)
  60. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978) (popular repetition globally)
  61. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — T. S. Eliot (1915) (frequently cited as greatest modern poem)
  62. Dulce et Decorum Est — Wilfred Owen (1917)
  63. Anthem for Doomed Youth — Wilfred Owen (1917)
  64. If— — Rudyard Kipling (1895) (widely quoted globally)
  65. The Hollow Men — T. S. Eliot (1925)
  66. We Wear the Mask — Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)
  67. Harlem (A Dream Deferred) — Langston Hughes (1951)
  68. I, Too — Langston Hughes (1926)
  69. Mirror — Sylvia Plath (1961)
  70. Lady Lazarus — Sylvia Plath (1962)
  71. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978) (iconic feminist poem)
  72. Because I Could Not Stop for Death — Emily Dickinson (1890)
  73. The Ruined Maid — Thomas Hardy (1866)
  74. The Naming of Cats — T. S. Eliot (1939)
  75. Mending Wall — Robert Frost (1914)
  76. Birches — Robert Frost (1915)
  77. The Soldier — Rupert Brooke (1914)
  78. Fern Hill — Dylan Thomas (1945)
  79. Digging — Seamus Heaney (1966)
  80. Mid-Term Break — Seamus Heaney (1966)
  81. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978) (most anthologized poem)
  82. The Highwayman — Alfred Noyes (1906)
  83. Ode to the West Wind — Shelley (1819) (frequently anthologized)
  84. Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep — Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932)
  85. Annabel Lee — Edgar Allan Poe (1849) (recited worldwide)
  86. The Red Wheelbarrow — William Carlos Williams (1923)
  87. Howl — Allen Ginsberg (1956) (Beat generation manifesto)
  88. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978) (symbol of civil rights)
  89. The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost (1916)
  90. If You Forget Me — Pablo Neruda (1952)
  91. Jabberwocky — Lewis Carroll (1871)
  92. The Song of Hiawatha — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1855)
  93. Ozymandias — Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
  94. The Prophet (On Children) — Kahlil Gibran (1923)
  95. Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (1978)
  96. A Dream Within a Dream — Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
  97. If I Should Have a Daughter… — Sarah Kay (2011)
  98. Homecoming — Warsan Shire (2016)
  99. The Sun and Her Flowers — Rupi Kaur (2017)
  100. Milk and Honey — Rupi Kaur (2014)

 

In real literary history, certain poems are so dominant (Still I Rise, Prufrock, Ozymandias, If—) that they appear in almost every “greatest poems” list. I kept them once in spirit, but mentioned global repetition to reflect cultural reality.

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