Free summaries
Poetry — page 4
281 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 4 of 6.
Farm Legends
Will Carleton
A collection of earnest, colloquial verses, these poems elevate the everyday dramas of nineteenth-century American rural life into moral lessons on human fallibility and redemption.
Harmonium
Wallace Stevens
A masterclass in the music of thought, this collection transforms the mundane textures of life into a vibrant, shimmering reality. It stands as one of the most significant and influential American poetic debuts of the twentieth century.
Eidolon
Walter Richard Cassels
This collection of poetry explores the interior development of the creative mind, tracing its movement from youthful isolation to a mature, action-oriented philosophy. It offers a meditative look at how a poet reconciles the beauty of the natural world with the inevitable sorrows of human existence.
An Anthology of Australian Verse
Unknown
This collection serves as a Victorian-era gallery of early Australian and New Zealand verse, capturing a landscape in transition from colonial outpost to a distinct, self-conscious nation. It preserves the voices of pioneers, bushmen, and settlers, documenting their struggle to map the spirit of a vast, formidable…
The poems of Thomas Gordon Hake
Thomas Gordon Hake
This collection captures the enduring voice of a nineteenth-century observer who translates deep, meditative stillness into rhythmic verse. It is a portrait of a poet who views the world through a lens of solemn, dreamlike contemplation.
Poems
Alexander Smith
A young man’s desperate, high-strung struggle to transform his private passions into enduring art defines this collection. It is a work of romantic turbulence, charting the heavy price of pursuing beauty in an indifferent world.
The Bible, King James version, Book 22: Song of Solomon
Anonymous
This collection of lyrical poetry explores the intensity of human longing, celebrating the physical and emotional devotion between two lovers through rich, natural imagery.
In the Saddle: A Collection of Poems on Horseback-Riding
Various
The rhythm of hooves provides the pulse for this collection, where the horse serves as both a witness to history and a vessel for human longing. These poems capture the urgency of the rider and the singular bond between beast and human.
Minor Poems
Unknown
Human emotion moves from bright youthful light into autumnal shadow, tracing love, loss, and the quiet passage of time across a landscape shaped by nature, war, and spiritual longing.
Poems and Songs
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Through vibrant lyrics of national pride, tender country romances, and fierce political battle cries, this collection captures the awakening soul of modern Norway.
Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets
Unknown
A faith lived in full daylight touches every corner of human experience, finding beauty in battle-fields, quiet hearths, and the vast expanse of the sky.
The Poetry of Wales
Unknown
Ancient voices call across rugged peaks and quiet valleys, offering a timeless refuge of faith, love, and heroic memory.
Embers, Complete
Gilbert Parker
Bound to the land they leave behind, wandering souls seek redemption, home, and love across rugged frontiers, ocean expanses, and desert wastes.
Love Letters of a Violinist, and Other Poems
Eric Mackay
A passionate musician cycles through despair and triumph, discovering that earthly love cannot be claimed by force, but must be won through devotion and art.
A Book of Irish Verse: Selected from modern writers, with an introduction and notes by W. B. Yeats
Unknown
The history of a nation is often best measured by the cadence of its laments and the fire of its songs. This collection preserves the lyrical soul of Ireland as it was understood at the turn of the twentieth century, bridging the gap between ancient Gaelic tradition and the modern literary voice.
Poems of reflection
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
This collection of verse captures the Victorian and early twentieth-century American spirit, navigating the heavy currents of grief, domestic piety, and moral reform with earnest, rhythmic sincerity. It is a work of heartfelt observation, speaking directly to the ordinary burdens of the soul.
The Mountainy Singer
Joseph Campbell
The world of these verses is one of elemental struggle, where the sacred and the savage exist side by side beneath the heavy, shifting skies of the Irish hills. It is a song of labor, land, and the enduring pulse of a people tethered to the soil.
A Lover's Diary, Complete
Gilbert Parker
A haunting sequence of sonnets, this work maps the terrain of a forbidden, lifelong devotion, where the heart finds its only sanctuary in the quiet, agonizing space between duty and desire.
Canzoni & Ripostes: Whereto are appended the Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme
Ezra Pound
The poet finds himself adrift in a sea of history and classical allusion, seeking to forge a new, sharp language from the ruins of the old. It is a restless, intellectual exploration of the tension between ancient beauty and the modern pulse.
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
This collection of verse captures the romantic, tragic, and martial spirit of a vanished Scotland, where loyalty to a lost cause often proved more enduring than life itself.
The Magic House, and Other Poems
Duncan Campbell Scott
A delicate, atmospheric collection of Canadian verse, these poems capture the quiet intersections of the natural world and the human spirit, echoing with the fleeting beauty of the changing seasons.
Shapes and Shadows
Madison Julius Cawein
The world is a tapestry of shifting light, where the boundaries between reality and the spirit realm dissolve into a haunting, lyrical meditation on beauty, loss, and the eternal ache of the human heart.
Sister Songs: An Offering to Two Sisters
Francis Thompson
A visionary poet weaves a tapestry of devotion, seeking to tether his own fractured spirit to the innocence of two sisters who represent the lost promise of his own youth.
Poems New and Old
John Freeman
This collection of poetry captures the transition between the turn of the century and the onset of the Great War, mapping the interior geography of an English soul caught between pastoral longing and historical upheaval. It is a work of quiet, rhythmic intensity, concerned less with the external events of its time…
The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils
Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski
Ancient Horace finds a surprisingly devout rebirth in the verse of a seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit whose lines turn classic Latin meters into Christian prayer and quiet rural retreat.
A book of women's verse
Unknown
Centuries of distinct female voices weave through political peril, domestic constraint, spiritual devotion, and quiet rebellion.
Des Imagistes: An Anthology
Unknown
Stripping away ornamental Victorian rhetoric, this groundbreaking 1914 anthology establishes a sharp new poetic mode driven by vivid imagery, sparse phrasing, and unyielding focus.
Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Modern verse breaks free from traditional meter to capture the exact texture of daily life, shifting landscapes, and the lingering horrors of a continent at war.
Eventide: A Series of Tales and Poems
Effie Afton
A young girl watches the river current carry her brother’s boat away, holding a basket of food bound for a cold, destitute home.
Cross Roads
Margaret E. (Margaret Elizabeth) Sangster
The candlelight catches a flicker of domestic warmth against the encroaching shadows of a wider world, grounding the reader in a space where personal grief and global conflict meet.
Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I
Jean Ingelow
This collection of Victorian verse balances the domestic warmth of English country life with the haunting, elemental power of the sea. It is a work of deep empathy, exploring the ways human beings find meaning in the face of loss, duty, and the vast mysteries of the natural world.
Poems by Speranza
Lady Wilde
A fervent call to national conscience and a mourning for the dispossessed, this collection captures the revolutionary spirit and heavy sorrow of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
Poems on Travel
Unknown
The world is a vast, restless map, yet the most profound journeys are often those we take without ever leaving our chairs. This collection gathers the voices of poets who have chased horizons, finding that the heart’s own landscape is the one destination that never changes.
Dymer
C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis
A young man shatters his regimented life to chase a half-glimpsed, ethereal dream, only to find that his quest for personal freedom carries a devastating, inescapable cost.
Phil-o-rum's Canoe, and Madeleine Vercheres: Two Poems
William Henry Drummond
These two narrative poems capture the spirit of early Canada through the voices of a weary frontiersman and a legendary heroine of the French colonial frontier.
The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 3: Psalms XC.-CL
Alexander Maclaren
This commentary serves as a meditative bridge between ancient Hebrew poetry and the heart of the seeker, exploring how the final collection of Psalms addresses the endurance of faith through life’s inevitable trials. It seeks to uncover the enduring relevance of these sacred songs, framing them not as relics, but…
The Violet Book
Unknown
A delicate, fragrant anthology, this collection gathers centuries of verse dedicated to the violet, exploring the flower’s enduring role as a symbol of modesty, memory, and the arrival of spring.
Poetry of the Supernatural
Unknown
The boundary between the living and the dead has always been porous, and nowhere is this more evident than in the verses that have haunted the English language for centuries. This guide explores the spectral presence that lingers in the stanzas of our greatest poets.
Ballads of Books
Unknown
A collection of verse celebrating the companionship, beauty, and quiet endurance of books, gathered to honor the lifelong devotion of the bibliophile.
Flint and Feather: Collected Verse
E. Pauline Johnson
This collection of verse captures the vast, rugged spirit of the Canadian frontier, blending indigenous heritage with a deep, lyrical devotion to the natural world.
Grass of Parnassus
Andrew Lang
The echoes of a fading, literary past bloom here like alpine flowers at the foot of a mountain, capturing the quiet melancholy of a life spent in love with old books and distant shores.
Songs Before Sunrise
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The poet sets a trumpet to his lips, summoning the dawn of a republican age where old tyrannies are swept away by the collective spirit of humanity. These verses act as a call to arms for the liberation of the soul and the dismantling of historical chains.
The Sylvan Cabin: A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln, and Other Verse
Edward Smyth Jones
A poetic record of an arduous pilgrimage, this volume captures the struggle of a young man whose hunger for education leads him from the South to a jail cell in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Daisy Dare, and Baby Power: Poems
Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
The wreckage of pride and the quiet, persistent pull of domestic love define this collection of verse. Through the lens of a nineteenth-century sensibility, the work explores how quickly human connection can be severed by impulsive judgments and the long, slow process of finding one’s way back to grace.
Pipe and Pouch: The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry
Unknown
This collection serves as a poetic sanctuary for the smoker, gathering verses that celebrate the pipe and cigar as quiet companions through the joys and sorrows of human life. It is an anthology of comfort, reflection, and defiant camaraderie.
The Ring of Amethyst
Alice Wellington Rollins
A quiet, domestic devotion transforms standard lyric conventions into a deep personal sanctuary.
Friends
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
The world of this collection is one where the golden light of English summers is perpetually shadowed by the sudden, extinguishing darkness of the Great War. It is a work of mourning, beauty, and intimate domesticity, capturing the quietude of home while the horizon burns.
Hymns of the Early Church: being translations from the poetry of the Latin church, arranged in the order of the Christian year
John Brownlie
A century of Latin sacred verse steps out of the shadows of the medieval cloister, reframed through a voice that is both scholarly and deeply devout.