Browse poetry and verse, from individual collections to works associated with major poetic traditions and literary voices. This collection currently contains 56 titles in Literra’s catalogue.
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Frost’s first poetry collection turns rural observation, work, desire, loneliness and changing seasons into tightly made lyric poems. It is a strong place to begin because the diction can feel conversational while the poems reward slower attention to form, imagery and speaker
A book of poems written from a child’s imaginative vantage point. It is useful not merely as children’s verse but as a lesson in rhythm, memory, play and the ability to make ordinary objects feel strange again
Andrew Lang's collection of ballads gathers traditional and literary verse whose stories travel through love, war, betrayal, supernatural events, family conflict, heroic deeds, and sudden tragedy. Ballads are built for memory and retelling, so their language tends to be direct and their
A Hidden Life and Other Poems brings together verse shaped by George MacDonald's recurring concerns with faith, mortality, love, nature, longing, suffering, and the search for a deeper spiritual reality beneath ordinary life. MacDonald often turns inward rather than outward: the most important
A Reading of Life, with Other Poems gathers George Meredith's poetry around the recurring problem of how to interpret human experience. Meredith is interested in beauty, desire, nature, aging, grief, love, intellectual struggle, and the changing relationship between human beings and the world
Epictetus teaches Stoicism through one central discipline: distinguish between what belongs to you and what does not. Your judgments, choices, intentions, and responses are yours to govern; other people’s opinions, physical events, reputation, wealth, and even bodily circumstances are not fully
Iqbal’s Urdu poetry combines philosophical reflection, religious imagination and a strong concern with human agency. Read it as a body of ideas expressed through lyric intensity rather than expecting the structure of a modern poetry collection
A major Urdu poetry collection by Muhammad Iqbal combining patriotic, philosophical, spiritual, and reformist poems across different periods of his development
Beowulf is one of the foundational works of English literature, an epic about monsters, warriors, kingship, courage, fame, and the certainty that even great strength eventually meets death. The poem begins with Beowulf traveling from the Geatish lands to Denmark to help King Hrothgar, whose
Cap and Gown is a campus novel centered on student life, friendship, academic pressure, social rivalry, and the process of growing into adulthood. The title points toward the symbolic transition represented by university life: a cap and gown are outward signs of education, but the people
Charmides and Other Poems collects early poetry by Oscar Wilde, combining lush description, mythological imagery, classical references, romantic feeling, and aesthetic attention to beauty. The title poem, Charmides, is a long narrative in which desire, beauty, and moral consequence unfold
The first canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy, following Dante’s journey through Hell and its circles as he confronts sin, punishment, politics, and moral order
A collection of Pashto poetry by Rahman Baba known for mystical devotion, humility, love, ethics, and reflections on the human condition
Byron uses the Don Juan story as a vehicle for satire, digression, social observation and comic surprise. The poem is deliberately expansive rather than solemn, and that makes it a useful antidote to the idea that canonical poetry must always sound grave
Dorothy Parker’s first major poetry collection, blending wit, irony, loneliness, romance, disappointment, and sharp observations of modern social life
An ancient Mesopotamian epic following King Gilgamesh through friendship, heroic adventure, grief, and the search for meaning and immortality
Pushkin’s verse novel about the detached Onegin, the sincere Tatiana, love, missed chances, social conventions, and the emotional consequences of indifference
Goethe’s dramatic poem follows Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles and his pursuit of knowledge, experience, love, power, and ultimate fulfillment
Tagore’s Gitanjali gathers devotional and contemplative poems concerned with love, nature, work, mortality and the relation between the ordinary and the sacred. It is particularly useful for a reader interested in how poetry can carry spiritual ideas without becoming a philosophical treatise
Claude McKay’s poetry collection explores race, migration, love, beauty, violence, alienation, and Black life in the early twentieth century
Legends, Tales and Poems brings together the romantic and supernatural imagination of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. His legends are full of haunted places, impossible love, ghosts, mysterious women, ancient ruins, and moments when ordinary reality seems to open onto another world
This landmark collection is useful for seeing two different approaches to Romantic poetry alongside one another: Wordsworth’s interest in ordinary life and Coleridge’s fascination with the strange, supernatural and psychologically uncanny
Walter Scott’s historical narrative poem mixes chivalry, romance, political intrigue, and the conflicts surrounding Scotland and England in the early sixteenth century
Moorish Literature is an anthology rather than a single continuous narrative, bringing together romantic ballads, tales, legends, folk traditions, and stories associated with the Berber and Kabyle peoples of North Africa. Its great appeal is the variety of voices and forms
Dickinson’s compressed poems often turn on paradox, dashes, slant rhyme, death, consciousness, nature and the instability of certainty. They are short enough to reread immediately, which makes them ideal for learning to analyze a poem line by line rather than only chasing a summary
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke are less interested in telling conventional stories than in transforming perception. A flower, an animal, a statue, a room, a landscape, or a human face can become the center of an intense meditation because Rilke’s poetry repeatedly asks what it would mean to truly
Poems (2) brings together verse associated with writers such as Robert Greene, whose work belongs to the rich literary world of the English Renaissance. Renaissance poetry could move easily between love, beauty, mythology, pastoral life, ambition, mortality, and theatrical imagination, and the
Poems (3) is a poetry collection that invites the reader to approach verse as a sequence of concentrated experiences rather than a continuous story. Individual poems can turn a small image into a question about memory, desire, loneliness, nature, time, or the strange ways people understand
Poems (4) is best understood as a varied journey through lyric language, where each poem creates its own atmosphere, argument, or emotional pressure. Poetry can make ordinary subjects suddenly strange: a landscape becomes a memory, love becomes an examination of vulnerability, and an everyday
Poems (5) is a collection for readers who enjoy the compression of poetry: a few lines can contain an entire relationship, landscape, argument, or change of mood. Rather than explaining experience from beginning to end, poems often capture the moment when something becomes visible—a
A collection from Keats’s early poetic period, including poems marked by sensuous imagery, nature, imagination, beauty, and the development of his mature style
Before the Brontë sisters became synonymous with novels such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, they wrote poetry together under the male-sounding names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. This collection preserves that earlier literary identity and reveals how closely poetry was tied to the
Thomas Hardy’s Poems of the Past and the Present is a collection built from memory, history, landscape, love, regret, and the uneasy awareness that the present is always carrying the dead with it. Hardy frequently places an intimate human feeling against a larger background: a relationship
Blake’s poems repeatedly place innocence, experience, freedom, authority, desire and spiritual perception in tension. Reading poems from his contrasting modes side by side helps a beginner see how symbols can carry arguments rather than simply decorate a page
Oscar Wilde’s Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol brings together the lyric and the deeply personal, culminating in the great prison poem written after Wilde’s imprisonment. Earlier poems show his fascination with beauty, love, art, myth, sorrow, and the musical possibilities of language
The latter two canticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy, tracing a journey through moral purification and finally into a vision of heavenly order and divine love
Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing is an anthology designed for elementary-school readers, collecting verse selected to be read aloud, remembered, and repeated. Its purpose is not simply to introduce children to literature; it reflects an older educational belief that memorizing good
Rhymes of a Roughneck is a poetry collection built around the voice of working-class life, giving ordinary labor, hardship, humor, romance, travel, and irritation a distinctly informal poetic language. The title signals that these are not polished drawing-room verses pretending everyday life
Chaucer’s frame turns a pilgrimage into a social cross-section: different storytellers reveal their status, prejudices, humor and values through the tales they choose to tell. It is a better introduction to medieval literature when approached as a collection of voices rather than a single plot
The Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England preserves the voices of Royalist culture during and after the English Civil Wars, collecting poems and songs written between 1642 and 1684. These works cover war, loyalty, politics, drinking, love, satire, exile, military life, and the nostalgia of
The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe gathers the verse in which Poe explores beauty, death, longing, madness, memory, dreams, loss, and the seductive edge between the beautiful and the terrifying. Many readers know Poe mainly for stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the
The Congo and Other Poems is Vachel Lindsay’s attempt to make poetry perform rather than merely describe. Lindsay’s verse is highly rhythmic, often designed for speaking aloud, with repeated sounds, chants, refrains, and dramatic shifts in pace
The complete poem extends Dante’s journey from Inferno through Purgatory and Paradise. Its scale can be intimidating, but reading it as an organized sequence of encounters makes the architecture easier to follow and shows how a single poem can combine theology, philosophy, politics and autobiography
Pindar’s surviving odes are poems written for athletic victories, religious occasions, and public celebration in ancient Greece, but they are far more ambitious than simple victory songs. Pindar takes an athlete’s success and places it inside a larger world of myth, ancestry, divine power
Tagore’s lyrical collection explores love, longing, nature, beauty, devotion, separation, and the inner life through intimate poems
The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems is a collection by Richard Le Gallienne built around longing, beauty, solitude, love, memory, and the desire to transform fleeting experiences into art. Le Gallienne’s poetry often prefers atmosphere to argument
The Man Against the Sky is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry collection about ambition, loneliness, disappointment, character, and the strange distances that can exist between the life people imagine and the life they actually live. Robinson is especially interested in figures who do not fit
The Miracle and Other Poems is a collection by Virna Sheard in which faith, love, grief, nature, memory, and the possibility of transcendence are expressed through accessible lyric verse. The word “miracle” suggests the collection’s central movement: ordinary experience can become meaningful
A compact work blending prose passages with lyric poems devoted to Dante’s idealized love for Beatrice. It is valuable for readers interested in the medieval tradition behind Dante’s later poetry and in the relationship between autobiography, devotion and poetic form
The Old Bush Songs preserves the ballads and songs associated with the Australian bush, especially the rough, mobile world of drovers, shearers, stockmen, travellers, and settlers. A
This volume brings the poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella into rhymed English translation, joining two very different Renaissance and early modern voices shaped by art, faith, love, conflict, and intellectual ambition. Michelangelo’s sonnets are famous for the tension
The Three Taverns is a dramatic poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson that draws on the biblical story of Paul’s arrival near Rome, but Robinson uses the ancient setting to explore the modern emotional problems that interested him throughout his career: doubt, loneliness, belief, pride, and the
The Vigil of Venus is a poetic work built around love, beauty, longing, and the instability of human desire. The central poem belongs to the tradition of classical or neo-classical verse that looks backward to the world of Venus and other ancient figures while using myth to express feelings
Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading is an early reader designed to teach children through carefully selected pieces of poetry and prose. Horace Elisha Scudder understood that learning to read is not only about decoding letters
Waltzing Matilda is one of Australia’s best-known cultural songs, built around the story of a travelling swagman who camps beside a billabong and steals a sheep. When the authorities arrive, the swagman chooses death rather than capture, and his spirit is imagined as continuing to haunt the
Wessex Poems and Other Verses gathers Thomas Hardy’s poetry shaped by the landscapes, dialects, people, and remembered traditions of the English region he called Wessex. Hardy’s countryside is never merely picturesque
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