Top 10 Poetry Collections to Read Before You Die
Ten essential poetry collections from Baudelaire to Anne Carson. Plath, Lorca, Neruda, Bukowski, Glück and more. The list to start with if you want to read poetry seriously.
Most poetry collections sit on shelves and never get opened for long enough to be understood. The reader buys them because someone said the poet was important, then leaves them next to the lamp for a year, then puts them in a charity bag once having failed to unravel the levels of complexity and rhythms that come with the form. Poetry can be both enchanting and complex at the same time. Indirect expressions are common and some interpretation is often a prerequisite. You must read and flow with the lines and read between them.
The collections on this list reward the reader who commits to the poems. Each collection will change the way you read. None of them are difficult in the way people expect poetry to be difficult. But all of them are demanding in the way honest writing is, which is to say they ask you to slow down and pay attention. Not easy in the modern world.
Ten books. A century and a half between the oldest and the newest. If you only read three, read Plath, Heaney, and Carson. If you only read one, read Lorca. If you read all ten, you will have a better grounding in modern poetry than most English degrees can deliver.
1. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855 at his own expense. He set the type himself in a print shop in Brooklyn after his job as a journalist had run dry. The first edition contained twelve poems, including “Song of Myself”, which is one of the founding documents of American literature.
Whitman invented something with this book. Free verse, the long line, the catalogue as a poetic form, the I that contains multitudes. Every American poet who came after him is either following him or running away from him. Reading Leaves of Grass is reading the moment poetry stopped being a formal exercise and became a way of being alive on a particular day in a particular country.
He revised and expanded the book for the rest of his life. The deathbed edition contains nearly 400 poems. Start with the 1855 version. It is the rawest and the most necessary.
Buy Leaves of Grass from Bookshop.org →
2. The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire published Les Fleurs du mal in Paris in 1857. The French government banned six of the poems for offending public morality. He paid the fine. The book changed European poetry forever.
The Flowers of Evil is the first great modern book of poems. Baudelaire wrote about prostitutes and street drunks and decomposing horses and the strange beauty of urban filth. He invented the figure of the flâneur, the man who walks the city without purpose and sees everything. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, all of them came out of this book.
Read it in a good translation. The Richard Howard version from 1982 is the standard. Some of the poems are dark in ways the Victorians would have called depraved, and we would now call honest. That is the whole point. Baudelaire said the truth out loud when no one else was willing to.
Buy The Flowers of Evil from Bookshop.org →
3. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was nineteen years old when he wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He published it in Santiago, Chile, in 1924. It made him famous overnight. He spent the rest of his life trying to write poems as good as the ones in this book and rarely succeeded.
The poems are about two women, both real, both grieved over, both rendered with the kind of precision that only a teenager in love can manage. The most famous lines, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” and “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees”, are the most quoted love poems in any language for a reason.
Neruda went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1971. He served as Chile’s ambassador to France, then died days after Pinochet’s coup in 1973. None of his later books matter as much as this small first one.
Buy Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair from Bookshop.org →
4. Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca arrived in New York in June 1929 and stayed for nine months. He spoke no English. He lived in a dorm at Columbia University. He walked Harlem at night, sat in Wall Street offices during the crash, and watched the city eat itself alive in the early days of the Depression.
Poet in New York is the book he wrote about it. It was published posthumously in 1940, four years after Franco’s fascists shot him in a ditch outside Granada. The poems are surrealist, hallucinatory, full of Black Christs and dead children and mechanical bulls. Nothing else in his work prepares you for them. Nothing else in twentieth-century poetry sounds quite like them.
Read the bilingual edition with the Spanish facing the English. Even if you cannot read Spanish, you will see what the poems are doing on the page. They look like nothing anyone had written before, and like nothing anyone has written since.
Buy Poet in New York from Bookshop.org →
5. Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara
Frank O’Hara wrote most of the poems in Lunch Poems on his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he worked as a curator. City Lights published the book in 1964 in San Francisco, in their Pocket Poets series, with a cover by Jasper Johns.
The poems are short, conversational, immediate. They mention real people and real bars and real streets. They mention what O’Hara had for lunch and who he ran into and what film he saw the night before. They also break your heart, quietly, in the last two lines.
O’Hara died at forty in a freak accident on Fire Island in 1966, hit by a beach buggy on the sand. Lunch Poems is the book he is remembered for. It is also the best argument anyone has ever made for poetry as a way of paying attention to the day you happen to be living through.
Buy Lunch Poems from Bookshop.org →
6. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath put the manuscript of Ariel together in the autumn of 1962, in a cottage in Devon, after her marriage to Ted Hughes had collapsed. She killed herself in February 1963 in a flat in London. The book was published two years later by Faber in an edition Hughes had reorganised. It changed what people thought poetry could do.
The Ariel poems are the most famous body of work in twentieth-century English-language poetry. “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Tulips”, “Ariel”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”. They are the sound of a woman writing at the absolute limit of her own intelligence and her own pain, with nothing held back and nothing decorative left in.
The 2004 restored edition, edited by Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, gives you the manuscript in the order Plath intended. Read that one. It is the book she actually wrote, without anyone else’s hand on it.
7. Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney published Death of a Naturalist in 1966, when he was twenty-seven and working as a teacher in Belfast. The book is about growing up on a farm in County Derry in the 1940s and 1950s. It is also the book that announced the most important English-language poet of the second half of the twentieth century.
The poems are full of mud and frogs and blackberries and water diviners and his father digging potatoes in the field. The most famous one is “Digging”, which is a poem about a writer trying to work out whether his pen can ever do what his father’s spade did. It can. Heaney does.
He went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1995. He wrote eleven more books, all of them good. None of them are quite as raw as this first one. Read Death of a Naturalist for the sound of a poet finding his voice for the first time, before he knew how famous he was going to be.
Buy Death of a Naturalist from Bookshop.org →
8. Love Is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski wrote Love Is a Dog from Hell in his fifties, after a lifetime of bad jobs, bad apartments, and worse relationships. Black Sparrow Press published it in 1977 in Santa Rosa, California. It is the best book of poems ever written by an American who never went to college.
The poems are about women, drinking, racetracks, post office shifts, and the slow business of getting older without getting any better. They are also funny in ways other serious poets never let themselves be funny. Bukowski’s voice is direct, unliterary, completely unafraid of sounding stupid. It almost never sounds stupid. It usually sounds like the truth.
Read this one if you have ever wondered whether poetry has to be difficult to be real. It does not. Bukowski proves it on every page.
Buy Love Is a Dog from Hell from Bookshop.org →
9. The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
Louise Glück published The Wild Iris in 1992. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 and died in 2023, having spent forty years writing the most precise English of any American poet of her generation.
The Wild Iris is a book about a garden. It is also a book about God, about grief, about a marriage ending, about the relationship between language and the things language fails to name. The poems are spoken by flowers, by a gardener, and by something that might be God or might be the gardener’s own mind. The voices argue. The poems are very short and very quiet, and they cut deeper than almost anything else written in English in the last fifty years.
Start with “Snowdrops”. If it does not stop you, nothing in poetry will.
Buy The Wild Iris from Bookshop.org →
10. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Anne Carson published Autobiography of Red in 1998. It is a verse novel about a winged red monster named Geryon who survives an abusive childhood, falls in love with Herakles, takes photographs, and travels to South America. It is also a translation of, and conversation with, the fragments of an ancient Greek poet called Stesichoros, who wrote a poem about Geryon two and a half thousand years ago that survives only in scraps.
If that sounds difficult, it is not. Carson is one of the most readable poets alive. The book moves like a novel. The sentences are spare and surprising. The love story is one of the saddest in modern poetry, and the photographs and the Stesichoros fragments give the whole thing a kind of weight no other poetry book has quite achieved.
Carson is a classics professor at McGill University in Montreal. She has written more than twenty books. This is the one to start with. After this, read Nox, then Glass, Irony and God.
Buy Autobiography of Red from Bookshop.org →
Where to start
If you have never read a poetry collection cover to cover, start with Lunch Poems. It is the friendliest entry point on the list and you can finish it in an afternoon.
If you want to be devastated, read Plath. If you want to be moved, read Neruda. If you want to know why poetry matters, read Heaney.
The Glück, the Carson, and the Lorca will reward second and third readings in ways the others will not. Keep them on your desk for a year and dip in. The Bukowski, the O’Hara, and the Whitman are the books you press into the hands of friends. The Baudelaire is the one you return to when you want to remember what made all of this happen in the first place.
Ten books. A few months of reading. A grounding in what poetry can do that no curriculum will give you in the same time.
For more reading lists and long-form essays on the writers shaping the form, see our literary reviews and our craft essays.
Frequently asked
What is the best poetry collection of all time?
The most frequently cited contender is The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, which effectively invented modern poetry in 1857. Other strong candidates include Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca. There is no single answer. Pick one and start reading.
What poetry collection should I read first?
Start with Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. It is short, conversational, and immediately accessible. Most readers can finish it in an afternoon. The poems sound like a friend talking to you about his day. Once you have read O’Hara, you will be ready for the harder books on this list.
Who are the most important female poets of the twentieth century?
Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson are three of the most important. Plath wrote Ariel in 1962, the most famous body of work in twentieth-century English-language poetry. Glück won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for a body of work that includes The Wild Iris. Carson published Autobiography of Red in 1998 and remains one of the most innovative poets alive today.
What is the difference between a poem and a poetry collection?
A poem is a single piece of work. A poetry collection is a book containing multiple poems organised by the poet or an editor. Most great poets are remembered for specific collections rather than individual poems. Reading a collection cover to cover is the proper way to encounter a poet’s vision.
How many poetry collections should you read in a lifetime?
There is no required number. Reading ten essential collections, like the ones on this list, will give you a stronger grounding in modern poetry than most readers ever get. Reading slowly and rereading favourites matters more than ploughing through hundreds of books quickly.
Are these poetry collections suitable for beginners?
Most are. Lunch Poems, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and Love Is a Dog from Hell are the most accessible starting points. The Flowers of Evil, Poet in New York, and Autobiography of Red reward more experienced readers but are not unreadable for beginners. Pick the entry that matches your appetite and start there.
If you buy a book through the links on this page, tumbleweedwords.com earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. It helps keep the site running. Thank you.
Flash fiction and poetry in the tradition of what you just read. Written on the road. Over 1,200 readers. Free.
Read and subscribe →