Does anybody know of any poets besides William Shakespeare...?

Question

i need to memerize a 14 line poem but i dont know about poets. Can you please help?
thank you

Answer 1

Langston Hughes
Elizabeth Barret Browning
Sylvia Plath
Rudyard Kipling
Robert Frost
Maya Angelou
Lord Byron

Answer 2

A 14 line poem is usually a Sonnet

This example, On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three by John Milton, gives a sense of the Italian Form:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, (a)
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year! (b)
My hasting days fly on with full career, (b)
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. (a)
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, (a)
That I to manhood am arrived so near, (b)
And inward ripeness doth much less appear, (b)
That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th. (a)
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, (c)
It shall be still in strictest measure even (d)
To that same lot, however mean or high, (e)
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. (d)
All is, if I have grace to use it so, (c)
As ever in my great Task-master's eye. (e)

(Letters in parenthesis indicate rhyming scheme)

Answer 3

Henri Cole hovers around the sonnet in his book, Middle Earth. And any teacher should be duly impressed if you aren't a poetry grad and you choose to memorize an Henri Cole poem!

This is a poem from that book:

My Tea Ceremony
Henri Cole



Oh, you bowls, don’t tell the others I drink
my liquor out of you. I want a feeling of beauty
to surround the plainest facts of my life.
Sitting on my bare heels, making a formal bow,
I want an atmosphere of gentleness to drive
out the squalor of everyday existence
in a little passive house surrounded
by black rocks and gray gravel.
Half-cerebral, half-sensual, I want to hear
the water murmuring in the kettle
and to see the spider, green as jade,
remaining aloof on the wall
Heart, unquiet thing
I don’t want to hate anymore. I want love
to trample through my arms again.

But this one is my favorite:

Casablanca Lily
Henri Cole


It has the odor of Mother leaving
when I was a boy. I watch the back
of her neck, wanting to cry, Come back. Come back!
So it is the smell of not saying what I feel,
of irrationality intruding
upon the orderly, of experience
seeking me out, though I do not want it to.

Unnaturally white with auburn anthers,
climbing the invisible ladder from birth
to death, it reveals the whole poignant
superstructure of itself without piety,
like Mother pushing a basket down
the grocery aisle, her pungent vital body
caught in the stranglehold of her mind.

Answer 4

Well, the one I thought of IS Shakespeare--it's also my favorite:

SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

...and it happens to be fourteen lines!

A few other poets that come to mind are Emily Bronte, Adgar Allen Poe, and Robert Frost.

Answer 5

Pick a sonnet. They rhyme and they are easy to remember.

Here's A. E. Stallings's "A Bone to Pick With You"
http://www.versedaily.org/abtpwy.shtml

It's a fun little poem and should be interesting enough for an audience. And probably not something anyone else will be reciting for the millionth time!

Answer 6

Elizabeth Barret Browning and Robert Frost both have short poems in modern English that would be easier to memorize than the Bard.

Best wishes!

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If you'd like a three-stanza story, here is one, courtesy of Wikipedia:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

But he followed the pair to Pawtucket,
The man and the girl with the bucket;
And he said to the man,
He was welcome to Nan,
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.

Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset,
Where he still held the cash as an asset,
But Nan and the man
Stole the money and ran,
And as for the bucket, Manhasset.

Answer 7

Dorothy Parker or Katherine Tynann.

Answer 8

I prefer Robert Frost. Some of his poems can be very insightful. Try "The Road Not Taken."

Answer 9

Emily Dickinson would be a good choice for memorization.

...lol Candy beat me to it by seconds!

Answer 10

Emily Dickinson is a great poet to memorize. (: