Wilfred Owen
Killed a week before the Armistice at 25, Wilfred Owen left behind the most powerful poetry of the First World War — a look at his short life, his war, and the pity at the heart of his verse.
Era
modernist
26 poems
modernist
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats’s apocalyptic vision of a civilization spinning out of control — “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Full poem, summary, and analysis.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen’s searing First World War poem forces the reader to witness a soldier’s death by gas — and calls patriotic glory “the old Lie.” Full poem and analysis.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman walks out of a star lecture to look up at the real night sky — eight lines weighing measured knowledge against pure wonder. Full poem and analysis.
Grass
In Carl Sandburg’s “Grass” (1918) the grass itself speaks, burying the dead of Austerlitz, Gettysburg, and Verdun until travelers forget the battles ever happened — a quiet, chilling anti-war poem.
Fog
Carl Sandburg’s six-line “Fog” (1916) likens a harbor mist to a cat that sits on silent haunches and then moves on — his most famous short poem and a touchstone of American imagism.
Chicago
Carl Sandburg’s 1914 free-verse portrait of his adopted city hears every accusation against Chicago, grants them, and answers with fierce pride in its labor and rough, unbeatable vitality.
The Soldier
Facing death in the First World War, a soldier imagines the foreign field where he might lie becoming “for ever England.” A reading of Brooke’s 1914 sonnet: its patriotism, form, and idealised vision of home.
When You Are Old
Written for Maud Gonne when Yeats was in his twenties, this three-quatrain lyric asks the beloved to picture herself old by the fire — and to see, too late, that one man loved her soul rather than her beauty.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Everyone quotes “rage, rage” as pure defiance. But this is a son begging his dying father not to surrender, and the villanelle’s helpless circling enacts the very death it rages against.
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), the Pulitzer-winning poet of working-class America, made free verse a hymn to ordinary people — from “Chicago” to his monumental life of Lincoln.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A Pulitzer-winning virtuoso of the sonnet and a symbol of the modern “New Woman,” Millay burned her candle at both ends — pouring love, desire, and fierce independence into some of the finest American verse of her century.