A catalogue poem, or catalog poem, is a poem built from a list: names, objects, people, places or actions, piled up line after line, usually in a repeated pattern. In catalogue poetry the list is the poem’s engine. Each new item adds weight until the whole says something no single line could. The best place to see catalog poetry at work is Walt Whitman: read I Hear America Singing on Poetry Catalog.
What Makes a Catalogue Poem
A catalogue poem uses a list as its main structure, not just as one passing moment. You will usually notice three things.
Anaphora. The same opening word or phrase repeats at the start of line after line: “I hear,” “And,” “He who.” The repetition gives the list a drumbeat. Parallel grammar. Each line is built the same way, so the items feel like members of one family. Accumulation. The effect grows with every item. A catalogue can celebrate, lament, protest or simply look, but it always works by adding up.
Catalogues are among the oldest moves in poetry. Ancient epics list ships and heroes, and the Psalms and old prayers are full of litanies. In the nineteenth century Walt Whitman made the catalogue central to modern free verse.
Walt Whitman, the Master of the Catalogue
Whitman’s I Hear America Singing is the classic short example. Each line gives one worker and the song that belongs to them:
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman, the shoemaker, the hatter, the wood-cutter and the ploughboy follow, then the mother and the young wife. No one is more important than anyone else, and that equality is the poem’s point. Our guide What Is I Hear America Singing About? goes through it line by line.
Song of Myself contains some of the best-known catalogues in English. Section 15 is a panorama of the country, one scene per line:
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
For the whole poem, see What Is Song of Myself About?.
Whitman used the form again and again. A Song for Occupations lists trades and tools: “House-building, measuring, sawing the boards, / Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering.” There Was a Child Went Forth is a catalogue of everything a child takes in: “The early lilacs became part of this child.” And Salut au Monde! asks “What do you hear Walt Whitman?” and answers with line after line beginning “I hear.” You can find all of them on our Walt Whitman poems page.
Blake’s Catalogue of Warnings: Auguries of Innocence
William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence opens with its famous quatrain, “To see the world in a grain of sand.” Then it turns into a list of rhyming couplets, each one a small prophecy:
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage;
The starved dog, the misused horse, the hunted hare and the wounded skylark follow. Here the catalogue argues. Every item is evidence for one moral claim: cruelty to the smallest creature disturbs the whole order of things. More Blake is on our William Blake poems page.
Shakespeare’s Catalogue of Complaints: Sonnet 66
A catalogue can live inside a strict form too. In Sonnet 66, ten lines in a row begin with “And,” each naming one of the world’s injustices:
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
The couplet then turns on love: the speaker would gladly die, “Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.” Wordsworth does something similar in a sonnet’s opening lines; our guide What Is London, 1802 About? looks at that list of “altar, sword, and pen.” Browse the sonnets on our William Shakespeare poems page.
How to Read (and Write) a Catalogue Poem
Read it aloud. The rhythm comes from the repetition, and you will hear the list gather speed. Watch for the item that breaks the pattern, because that is usually where the meaning turns: the couplet in Sonnet 66, the opening quatrain in Auguries. Notice the order, too. Catalogues often move from small to large, near to far, or private to public.
To write one, choose a single frame (“I hear,” “And,” “Things I keep”), then make every item concrete. For a modern example from our contributors, read Diane Elayne Dees’s Cataloging My Art, which lists paintings and the artists behind them. If you write one, we publish new poets every weekday: submit your poem.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a catalogue poem?
A poem whose main structure is a list of people, things, places or actions, usually built with repetition and parallel lines.
Is it “catalog” or “catalogue” poetry?
They are the same thing. “Catalog” is the usual American spelling and “catalogue” the British one.
Who wrote the most famous catalogue poems?
Walt Whitman, above all in Song of Myself and I Hear America Singing. Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 are classic earlier examples.
What is the difference between a list poem and a catalogue poem?
Most readers use the terms interchangeably. “Catalogue” is the older literary term, used especially for Whitman’s long lists.
Does a catalogue poem have to rhyme?
No. Whitman’s catalogues are free verse, while Blake’s and Shakespeare’s rhyme.
Read Next
Full text: I Hear America Singing and Song of Myself. Fittingly for a site called Poetry Catalog, you can find hundreds more lists, litanies and long-breathed poems in our public domain poetry collection, and more about the poet behind the form on our About Walt Whitman page.