Laurel · Every poet, by period

Modern

1899–1930 · 47 poets · 76,291 lines

The modern period on this site stops at 1930, because that is where the public domain stops in the United States. It is enough to hold the turn: Yeats moving from the dreamy verse of the 1890s to the hard plain speech of Responsibilities; Frost making blank verse sound like a New England farmer; Eliot's Prufrock, which is free verse only if you do not listen to it; the Imagists, H.D. and Amy Lowell, cutting the line to the image.

The war poets belong here too, Owen with his pararhymes and Sassoon with his anger, along with Brooke, who died on the way to Gallipoli in 1915, and the American voices of the 1910s: Masters's epitaphs, Robinson's portraits, Millay's sonnets, Teasdale's songs, Johnson's hymn to the unknown makers of the spirituals. Read them against the Victorians and you can watch rhyme and regular metre loosen their hold, measure by measure.

  1. Robert Frost 1874–1963Mountain IntervalNorth of BostonA Boy's WillNew Hampshire
  2. Langston Hughes 1902–1967The Weary Blues
  3. T. S. Eliot 1888–1965Prufrock and Other Observations
  4. Wallace Stevens 1879–1955Harmonium
  5. William Carlos Williams 1883–1963Al Que Quiere!Sour Grapes
  6. Ezra Pound 1885–1972PersonaeCathayLustra
  7. W. B. Yeats 1865–1939The Wind Among the ReedsPoemsResponsibilities
  8. Wilfred Owen 1893–1918Poems
  9. Ivor Gurney 1890–1937Severn and Somme
  10. Isaac Rosenberg 1890–1918Poems
  11. John Masefield 1878–1967Salt-Water Ballads
  12. G. K. Chesterton 1874–1936The Ballad of the White HorseThe Wild Knight and Other Poems
  13. Walter de la Mare 1873–1956Peacock PieThe Listeners and Other Poems
  14. Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892–1950Renascence and Other Poems
  15. Jean Toomer 1894–1967Cane
  16. Countee Cullen 1903–1946Color
  17. Claude McKay 1890–1948Harlem Shadows
  18. Hart Crane 1899–1932White Buildings
  19. Marianne Moore 1887–1972Poems
  20. Siegfried Sassoon 1886–1967Counter-Attack and Other PoemsThe War Poems
  21. Robert Graves 1895–1985Fairies and Fusiliers
  22. Rupert Brooke 1887–19151914 and Other Poems
  23. D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930Amores
  24. James Joyce 1882–1941Chamber Music
  25. Edgar Lee Masters 1868–1950Spoon River Anthology
  26. Vachel Lindsay 1879–1931The Congo and Other Poems
  27. Sara Teasdale 1884–1933Love SongsFlame and Shadow
  28. Joyce Kilmer 1886–1918Trees and Other Poems
  29. Alan Seeger 1888–1916Poems
  30. Elinor Wylie 1885–1928Nets to Catch the Wind
  31. Stephen Vincent Benét 1898–1943Young Adventure
  32. Charlotte Mew 1869–1928The Farmer's Bride
  33. Edwin Arlington Robinson 1869–1935The Children of the NightThe Town Down the River
  34. H.D. 1886–1961Sea Garden
  35. Amy Lowell 1874–1925Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
  36. Edward Thomas 1878–1917Poems
  37. Robert W. Service 1874–1958Songs of a Sourdough
  38. James Weldon Johnson 1871–1938Fifty Years and Other Poems
  39. Anonymous Poems
  40. George William Russell 1867–1935The Divine Vision and Other Poems
  41. John McCrae 1872–1918In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems
  42. Richard Le Gallienne 1866Poems
  43. John Reynolds Poems
  44. Frances Bannerman Poems
  45. Dora Sigerson 1918Poems
  46. Laurence Binyon 1869Poems
  47. Fanny Greville Poems

The periods are the ones the history track uses; a poet named in a period's own list belongs to it whatever the dates say.