100 poems to break your heart

Surprised by joy... impatient as the Wind / William Wordsworth

This living hand / John Keats

I am / John Clare

In Memoriam, VII / Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / Gerard Manley Hopkins

The God Abandons Antony / Constantine Cavafy

The Voice / Thomas Hardy

The Owl / Edward Thomas

The Pretty Redhead / Guillaume Apollinaire

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / Edna St. Vincent Millay

Song for a Dark Girl / Langston Hughes

Rooms / Charlotte Mew

Black Stone Lying on a White Stone / César Vallejo

I'm Going to Sleep / Alfonsina Storni

To Julia de Burgos / Julia de Burgos

In Memory of M. B. / Anna Akhmatova

The Fifth Eclogue / Miklós Radnóti

Café / Czesław Miłosz

Merciful God / Kadya Molodowsky

Shemà / Primo Levi

On Living / Nâzim Hikmet

Aspects of Robinson / Weldon Kees

The rites for Cousin Vit / Gwendolyn Brooks

Not Waving but Drowning / Stevie Smith

In the Midst of Life / Tadeusz Różewicz

On the road at night there stands the man / Dahlia Ravikovitch

Poem of the Gifts / Jorge Luis Borges

In the Park / Gwen Harwood

The Whipping / Robert Hayden

Night Sweat / Robert Lowell

Wanting to Die / Anne Sexton

My Nightingale / Rose Ausländer

Next Day / Randall Jarrell

Montana Fifty Years Ago / J. V. Cunningham

For the Anniversary of My Death / W. S. Merwin

Poem / Muriel Rukeyser

The Idea of Ancestry / Etheridge Knight

Henry's Understanding / John Berryman

A Deathplace / L. E. Sissman

They Feed They Lion / Philip Levine

The Small Square / Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Under One Small Star / Wisława Szymborska

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg / Richard Hugo

On This Side of the River / Stephen Berg

Aubade / Philip Larkin

Parents / William Meredith

Essay / Hayden Carruth

Arches / James Schuyler

Kindness / Naomi Shihab Nye

The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River / Allen Grossman

The Book of Yolek / Anthony Hecht

Mr Cogito and the Imagination / Zbigniew Herbert

From My Window / C. K. Williams

Night Song / Louise Glück

The Race / Sharon Olds

In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn / Donald Justice

The Dancing / Gerald Stern

For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (for we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live) / Joy Harjo

Mendocino Rose / Garrett Hongo

(Dedications) / Adrienne Rich

The Gas-poker / Thom Gunn

What He Thought / Heather McHugh

It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen / Les Murray

The People of the Other Village / Thomas Lux

For the Taking / Linda Gregerson

Terminus / Nicholas Christopher

What the Living Do / Marie Howe

The War Works Hard / Dunya Mikhail

Halley's Comet / Stanley Kunitz

Song / Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Simile / Rosanna Warren

In Memory of Joe Brainard / Frank Bidart

jasper texas 1998 / Lucille Clifton

The Rapture / Cynthia Huntington

Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two / Richard Howard

Quarantine / Eavan Boland

Woman Martyr / Agi Mishol

We Are Not Responsible / Harryette Mullen

Shelley / Galway Kinnell

Aphasia / Vijay Seshadri

On Wanting to Tell [ ] About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes / Mary Szybist

Lead / Mary Oliver

Persimmon / Anya Krugovoy Silver

Ethel's Sestina / Patricia Smith

Woman, Mined / Carolyn Creedon

Graveyard Blues / Natasha Trethewey

Requiem / Camille Dungy

Aubade in Autumn / Peter Everwine

Barton Springs / Tony Hoagland

Failure / Philip Schultz

An Individual History / Michael Collier

The Second Slaughter / Lucia Perillo

Old School / Michael Waters

Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room / Lucie Brock-Broido

The African Burial Ground / Yusef Komunyakaa

The Addict's Mother: Birth Story / Kate Daniels

Spirit Boxing / Afaa Micahel Weaver

Obit [The Blue Dress] / Victoria Chang

Pantoum for the Broken / Toi Derricotte

Krishna, 3:29 A.M. / Meena Alexander.