The wealth of poetry written in the classic period of British Poetry spans a wealth of subjects over a period of around 400 years. There is a lot of Great 20th Century Poetry but we have covered that elsewhere, and its tone and style changed dramatically from that which had come before. Here is a selection of some of the very finest poems from that classic period.
- Leigh Hunt - Abou Ben Adhem
- William Blake - And did those Feet in Ancient Time
- Anon - Sir Patrick Spens
- Percy Bysshe Shelley - Art Thou Pale for Weariness
- Robert Burns - Banks of Doon
- HW Longfellow - Children's Hour
- William Wordsworth - Daffodils
- Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach
- Thomas Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
- Robert Browning - Home Thoughts From Abroad
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning - How Do I Love Thee
- AE Housman - Into My Heart an Air that Kills
- Sir Walter Scott - Lochinvar
- William Wordsworth - My Heart leaps Up When I Behold
- Thomas Hood - November
- John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
- Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias
- Gerald Manley Hopkins - Pied Beauty
- Christina Rossetti - Remember
- Robert Louis Stevenson - Requiem
- William Blake - Sick Rose
- Thomas Hood - Song of the Shirt
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18
- Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade
- Alfred Noyes - The Highwayman
- Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Lady of Shallot
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- William Blake - The Tyger
- Gerald Manley Hopkins - The Windhover
- John Keats - To Autumn
- Andrew Marvell - To His Coy Mistress
- Alfred Tennyson - Ulysses
- William Wordsworth - Upon Westminster Bridge
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Xanadu (Kubla Khan)