It is almost impossible to choose the best poetry of any genre or epoch, but here is a selection of some of what I consider the very best poetry written by poets from, or living in, the British Isles in the 20th Century.
- Liz Lochhead - A New View of Scotland/Love Poem
- Dachine Rainer - A Note EJB: 1968-1973
- John Betjeman - A Subaltern's Love Song
- Edward Thomas - Adlestrop
- Thomas Hardy - Afterwards
- Philip Larkin - An Arundel Tomb
- William Butler Yeats - An Irish Airman Forsees His Death
- Wilfred Owen - Anthem For Doomed Youth
- William Empson - Aubade
- Seamus Heaney - Blackberry Picking
- John Masefield - Cargoes
- John Betjeman - Christmas
- Seamus Heaney - Digging
- Dylan Thomas - Do Not Go Gently
- Anon - Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep
- Wilfred Owen - Dulce Et Decorum Est
- Siegfried Sassoon - Everyone Sang
- Dylan Thomas - Fern Hill
- WH Auden - Funeral Blues
- William Butler Yeats - He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
- William Empson - Homage to the British Museum
- Rudyard Kipling - If
- William Butler Yeats - Leda the Swan
- William Henry Davies - Leisure
- Henry Reed - Lessons of the War
- William Empson - Let It Go
- Robert Service - Marie Antoinette
- William Empson - Missing Dates
- WH Auden - Night Mail
- Stevie Smith - Not Waving But Drowning
- Roderick Benziger - Piano Lessons
- Brian Patten - Portrait of a Young Girl Raped at a Suburban Party
- Louis MacNiece - Prayer before Birth
- Elaine Feinstein - Rosemary in Provence
- John Masefield - Sea-Fever
- John Betjeman - Slough
- Hilaire Belloc - Tarantella
- Thomas Hardy - The Darkling Thrush
- Simon Armitage - The Fox
- Rudyard Kipling - The Glory of the Garden
- William Butler Yeats - The Lake Isle of Innisfree
- Walter De La Mare - The Listeners
- TS Eliot - The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
- GK Chesterton - The Rolling English Road
- Thomas Hardy - The Ruined Maid
- WH Auden - The Shield of Achilles
- Rupert Brooke - The Soldier
- Louis MacNiece - The Sunlight on the Garden
- TS Eliot - The Waste Land
- Hugh MacDiarmid - The Watergaw
- Rudyard Kipling - The Way Through the Woods
- Violet Jacob - The Wild Geese
- Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse
- Margaret Atwood - This is a Photograph of Me
- Tony Harrison - Thomas Campey and the Copernican System
- William Empson - To an Old Lady
- Ted Hughes - View of a Pig
- William Empson - Villanelle
- Alice Oswald - Wedding
- William Butler Yeats - When You Are Old
- Philip Larkin - Whitsun Weddings
- Mary Oliver - Wild Geese
- Paul Muldoon - Wind and Tree
- Margaret Atwood - You Begin