Free summaries
Poetry — page 7
666 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 7 of 14.
Autumn Leaves
Ardelia Maria Cotton Barton
The search for meaning in a world of fleeting time defines these meditations, which find quiet strength in the humble persistence of the human spirit.
Poems, 1914-1919
Maurice Baring
Written in the shadow of the Great War, these elegies and sonnets capture a world fracturing under the weight of sudden loss, searching for beauty in the wreckage of a shattered generation.
The Black Christ, & other poems
Countee Cullen
This volume of verse moves from the personal lyrics of a young poet to a haunting, visionary exploration of faith and racial trauma in the American South. It captures the tension between the fragility of human joy and the endurance of spiritual struggle.
The Millennium, and Other Poems: To Which is Annexed, a Treatise on the Regeneration and Eternal Duration of Matter
Parley P. (Parley Parker) Pratt
The promise of a future, perfected world serves as the anchor for this collection of verse and theological prose, grounding spiritual hope in the very soil of the earth. It offers a rare window into the intense convictions, personal suffering, and expansive vision of a formative figure in the early Latter Day Saint…
A Song of the Open Road, and Other Verses
Louis J. McQuilland
The restless, lyrical spirit of a displaced Irishman, this collection of verse captures the tension between the yearning for a lost, mythic home and the practical demands of an adopted metropolitan life.
Motley, and other poems
Walter De la Mare
The world is a haunting, fragile stage where beauty and sorrow dance in lockstep. To witness this spectacle is to know the ache of being alive and the quiet mercy of an approaching, inevitable end.
Studies in Song
Algernon Charles Swinburne
This collection of verse captures the restless energy of the Victorian imagination, turning its gaze from the vast, indifferent power of the ocean to the intimate, fire-lit lives of poets and historical figures.
Gleams of Sunshine: Optimistic Poems
Joseph Horatio Chant
The poet finds beauty in the ordinary, turning his gaze toward the divine order of nature and the quiet triumphs of faith.
A little child's wreath
Elizabeth Rachel Chapman
Grief is a landscape we all eventually traverse, and this collection of sonnets serves as both a map of that sorrow and a quiet sanctuary for those who have lost a child. It is a work of profound intimacy, turning the private ache of bereavement into a public meditation on love, loss, and the nature of immortality.
Sonnets and Songs
Helen Hay Whitney
This collection explores the persistent, often painful magnetism of love, tracing its echoes through the changing seasons of the heart and the quiet, enduring patterns of the natural world.
Dentologia
Solyman Brown
This ambitious work attempts to translate the rigorous, often painful realities of early nineteenth-century dental science into the elevated language of didactic poetry. It serves as a comprehensive manual for oral health, blending cautionary verses on the decay of the body with a robust collection of professional,…
Revised Edition of Poems
Bill o'th' Hoylus End
This collection of verse captures the rhythmic, defiant spirit of a nineteenth-century Yorkshire laborer, offering a window into the daily trials and hard-won joys of a vanishing industrial world.
The rise and fall of the mustache, and other "Hawk-eyetems"
Robert J. (Robert Jones) Burdette
The nineteenth-century American landscape was one of rapid change, and this collection of wit and whim offers a sharp, satirical mirror to the era’s domestic anxieties, social pretenses, and the absurdities of daily life.
The Garden of Dreams
Madison Julius Cawein
This collection of verse captures the ephemeral spirit of the American landscape through the eyes of a wanderer who finds the sacred in the wild. It is a lyrical meditation on the blurred boundary between the living world and the realm of memory.
Around the Boree Log, and Other Verses
John O'Brien
Through rhythmic verse and local lore, a gentle observer captures the spirit of early Australian bush life, where faith, hardship, and the quiet dignity of the immigrant experience define a growing nation.
The book of earth
Alfred Noyes
The history of science is not a cold sequence of facts, but a grand, unfolding epic of human discovery. To trace the evolution of our understanding is to walk the very edge of the abyss where the light of truth first flickered.
Sea Spray: Verses and Translations
T. W. (Thomas William) Rolleston
Seeking the sublime in the everyday, this collection gathers lyrical meditations on nature, memory, and the enduring power of myth. It reflects the restless spirit of a translator and poet who finds the ancient world inextricably woven into the fabric of the modern.
The garden of desire
Edna Worthley Underwood
The garden of desire is a sequence of sonnets exploring a clandestine, high-stakes love affair. It captures the tension between the sanctuary of a secret life and the relentless, often cold, reality of the world outside.
The Ghetto, and Other Poems
Lola Ridge
HOOK A fierce, rhythmic exploration of the immigrant tenement experience, these poems capture the raw heat and crushing power of early 20th-century New York with the precision of a master observer.
The Story of Justin Martyr, and Other Poems
Richard Chenevix Trench
The spiritual journey is rarely a straight line; it is a series of retreats, revelations, and returns, captured here in verse that seeks the divine amid the heavy dust of human experience.
Poems, Vol. IV
Hattie Howard
This collection of verse captures the quiet rhythm of an American life at the turn of the twentieth century, finding profound significance in domestic routine, the changing seasons, and the simple dignity of neighborly kindness.
Some Poems of Roger Casement
Roger Casement
A man of deep conscience and singular devotion, he walked through life with eyes fixed on the liberation of his people, even as he sensed the shadow of the gallows drawing near.
The House of the Trees & Other Poems
A. Ethelwyn Wetherald
A collection of lyrical verse that seeks to bridge the gap between the chaotic, dusty modern world and the quiet, restorative sanctity of nature. This work finds its enduring power in the way it captures the ache of nostalgia and the gentle, persistent rhythm of the seasons.
Yesterdays
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A soul-bare collection of youthful verse captures the fleeting tragedies of broken vows, lost innocence, and the sudden, quiet turn toward resilience.
Heart Songs
Jean Blewett
Everyday life on the nineteenth-century Canadian frontier finds quiet grace in verse that values home, faith, and simple affection over lofty ambition.
English Poems, Volume 02 (of 2)
Fernando Pessoa
Anxious bride, impatient groom, and a village swept up in the raw, unvarnished pulse of human desire on a wedding day.
Poems of Progress
Lizzie Doten
A collection of visionary 19th-century poems champions human progress, spiritual immortality, and universal love over rigid religious dogma and social injustice.
A book of Christmas verse
Unknown
A midwinter journey through centuries of song, this anthology moves from medieval lullabies and mystical Visions to the lively, alcohol-warmed revelry of the traditional English hall.
By the Aurelian Wall, and Other Elegies
Bliss Carman
A quiet, sweeping lament for lost voices and vanished friends, this volume transforms grief into an enduring song of the wild Northland and the open sea.
A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The sea, the child, and the song are the three pillars that hold up this vast, rhythmic exploration of the natural world and the human spirit. It is a work of deep, rolling music, capturing a mind at once reverent toward the masters of the past and fiercely defiant of the rigid hierarchies of its own day.
Ballades and Verses Vain
Andrew Lang
The poet captures the elusive spirit of the past through the rigid elegance of classical forms, turning the fleeting moments of life into enduring verse.
Song-Surf
Cale Young Rice
The restless reach of the human spirit toward the infinite provides the heartbeat for these verses, casting a lyric spell over the boundaries of life, death, and distant lands.
The Argosy, Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891
Various
This expansive collection from 1891 captures the Victorian appetite for mystery, travel, and the uncanny, offering a vibrant cross-section of late-nineteenth-century literary tastes.
Orchard and Vineyard
V. (Victoria) Sackville-West
The landscape of the mind is often as untamable as the wild moors, yet beauty remains a constant, persistent force. This collection maps the quiet tension between the longing for freedom and the pull of home.
The Angel in the Cloud
Edwin W. (Edwin Wiley) Fuller
A man seeks answers to the riddle of existence by traveling through the cosmos on a cloud, confronting the divine and the nature of human desire. This philosophical journey challenges the boundaries of mortality, faith, and the self.
Afterglow
Julia C. R. (Julia Caroline Ripley) Dorr
This collection of late-career poetry finds the beauty in the sunset of life, exploring the tension between earthly attachments and the quiet inevitability of the encroaching dark.
Mountain Idylls, and Other Poems
Alfred Castner King
The jagged peaks of the San Juan mountains serve as a vast, indifferent backdrop for one man’s meditation on the fragility of human existence and the inescapable reality of decay.
Poems of Sentiment
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A collection of impassioned verses measuring the height of human desire and the quiet weight of its cost.
The Hymns of Ann Griffiths, of Dolwar Fechan, Translated into English Verse
Ann Griffiths
HOOK A series of lyrical, meditative poems from a nineteenth-century Welsh farm, these hymns trace a solitary pilgrim’s journey toward divine grace, transforming personal suffering into a vision of universal redemption.
Hafiz in London
Justin H. (Justin Huntly) McCarthy
A melancholic poet wanders the grey streets of London, haunted by the phantom of the ancient Persian master Hafiz and the impossible beauty of a lost love.
Poems (1828)
Thomas Gent
A candid, wry, and bittersweet portrait of the literary life in the 1820s, these verses capture the struggle between the soaring ambitions of a poet and the crushing realities of debt, loss, and obscurity.
Twenty
Stella Benson
The threshold of this collection lies in the tension between a fragile, constructed present and a world that threatens to dismantle it. It is a quiet, sharp-edged map of a soul seeking refuge in its own making.
Ballads of Peace in War
Michael Earls
A soldier marches to battle with a mother’s blessing, while back home an old man finds a whole summer hidden in his winter window.
Poems - First Series
Squire, John Collings, Sir
This collection captures the fleeting, heavy ache of a world in transition, finding sanctuary in the quiet observation of nature and the persistent, if fragile, nobility of human life. It is an intimate, restless record of a poet navigating the shift from the certainties of youth to the shadows cast by the Great War.
The Nuts of Knowledge: Lyrical Poems Old and New
George William Russell
A collection of verse that seeks to bridge the chasm between the fleeting, fragile beauty of the human experience and the vast, eternal stillness of the divine.
Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and other poems
Isabella Valancy Crawford
Nature—both the untamed, rugged landscape of the Canadian frontier and the internal, elemental forces of human desire—drives this collection of verse. It captures a world where the wilderness is not merely a setting, but a living, breathing participant in the lives of those who inhabit it.
Poems
Josephine Daskam Bacon
Restless wanderers, grieving mothers, and forgotten spirits haunt this lyrical collection, where domestic tenderness collides with an unyielding urge to break free.
Poems, translated and original
E. F. (Elizabeth Fries) Ellet
This collection of verse and drama explores the weight of tradition, the fragility of personal agency, and the inescapable gravity of fate within the rigid, often unforgiving, structures of historical society.