Best Poetry Books

The fall of Satan, the creation of the world, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve — in twelve books of blank verse written by a blind man from memory and dictation. Milton's stated aim was to 'justify the ways of God to men', but the poem's Satan is so compelling that Blake argued Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'.

The second canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante and Virgil climb the mountain of Purgatory, where souls atone for the seven deadly sins and prepare for Paradise. The most human and most hopeful of the three canticles, written with greater lyric tenderness than Inferno.

Aeneas, survivor of Troy, journeys to Italy to found the civilization that will become Rome. In twelve books of Latin hexameter, Virgil traces Aeneas's trials at sea, his affair with Dido in Carthage, his descent into the underworld, and his final wars in Latium — creating the founding myth of the Roman world.

The third canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante ascends through the nine spheres of Heaven with Beatrice, encounters the souls of the blessed, and culminates in the vision of God as a point of light and the rose of the redeemed. The most theologically demanding and most visually dazzling part of the poem.

A group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury agree to tell stories to pass the time. Each tale reflects its teller — the Knight's romance, the Miller's bawdy fabliau, the Wife of Bath's self-portrait, the Pardoner's moral tale told by an immoral man. The foundational work of English literature.

Lucretius's philosophical poem expounding Epicurean atomism — the argument that the universe consists of atoms and void, that the soul dissolves at death, that the gods do not intervene in human affairs, and that therefore the fear of death is irrational. Written in Latin hexameters of great beauty, c. 60 BCE.

Maya Angelou's landmark collection of verse celebrating Black joy, female resilience, and the unbreakable human spirit in the face of oppression.

A debut poetry collection exploring survival through the experiences of love, loss, trauma, and femininity.

Rupi Kaur's second collection explores migration, identity, and the cycles of wilting and blooming through 256 pages of spare, illustrated verse.

Rupi Kaur's third collection turns inward, exploring the relationship between mind, body, and the concept of home as a place both found and made.

Plath's posthumous collection, written in the final months of her life, contains some of the twentieth century's most celebrated and disturbing poems — including 'Lady Lazarus,' 'Daddy,' and 'Edge' — a volcanic explosion of imagery, rage, and technical mastery.

Pasternak's 1922 poetry collection — written in the summer of 1917, during the revolutionary period — made him immediately famous in Russian literary circles. The poems are extraordinarily sensuous: nature, weather, rain, and the body are rendered with a precision that owes something to Rilke and something to no one. The poetry at the end of Doctor Zhivago belongs to this tradition.

The definitive English anthology of Fernando Pessoa's poetry — including all four major heteronyms (Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Pessoa himself) in translations by Richard Zenith.

Written after his release from prison and published under a pseudonym, Wilde's poem about the execution of a fellow prisoner — 'he did not wear his scarlet coat, for blood and wine are red' — is his most politically direct work. The poem indicts the prison system, capital punishment, and Victorian society's treatment of those it destroys, written in ballad form that gives the critique populist reach.

Plath's debut poetry collection, published when she was twenty-seven, reveals a poet of extraordinary technical command working in the shadow of her influences — Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Roethke — and beginning to discover the voice that would produce Ariel.