A great poem doesn’t have to be long. Each poem here is 24 lines or fewer, short enough to read in a minute and learn by heart in an afternoon. This collection gathers short famous poems from the Poetry Catalog public domain archive: Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Blake’s “The Tyger,” Wordsworth’s daffodils, Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and more.
Every title links to the full poem, free to read, grouped by poet. The number after each title is its length in lines.
For more by any of these writers, visit our Public Domain Poetry page, which links to each poet’s complete collection.
Short Famous Poems by Emily Dickinson
- Hope (Hope Is the Thing with Feathers) (12 lines) – Hope as a small bird that sings in the soul and never asks for a crumb.
- I’m Nobody! Who Are You? (8 lines) – A playful poem on the dreariness of being “somebody.”
- There Is No Frigate Like a Book (8 lines) – A book can take you farther than any ship.
- If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking (7 lines) – Seven lines on a life well spent.
- I Never Saw a Moor (8 lines) – Faith in what we’ve never seen.
- A Word (A Word Is Dead) (6 lines) – Six lines on how a word begins to live once it is said.
- The Brain (The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky) (12 lines) – The mind can hold the sky and the sea.
More: All Emily Dickinson poems
Short Famous Poems by William Blake
- The Tyger (24 lines) – “Tiger, tiger, burning bright”: who could make such a fearful creature?
- The Lamb (20 lines) – “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The gentle companion to “The Tyger.”
- A Poison Tree (16 lines) – Anger kept secret grows into a deadly tree.
- The Sick Rose (8 lines) – Eight lines about an invisible worm.
- Ah, Sunflower (8 lines) – A sunflower, “weary of time,” follows the sun across the sky.
More: All William Blake poems
Short Famous Poems by William Wordsworth
- I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (24 lines) – The daffodils, “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
- My Heart Leaps Up (The Rainbow) (9 lines) – “The Child is father of the Man.”
- The World Is Too Much with Us (14 lines) – “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
- Composed upon Westminster Bridge (14 lines) – “Earth has not anything to show more fair”: London at dawn.
More: All William Wordsworth poems
Short Famous Poems by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (14 lines) – Fourteen lines that promise to make a love last forever.
- Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds (14 lines) – True love doesn’t change.
More: All William Shakespeare poems
Short Famous Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Ozymandias (14 lines) – “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” A broken statue in the desert.
- Music, When Soft Voices Die (8 lines) – Eight lines on what lingers in memory.
More: All Percy Bysshe Shelley poems
Short Famous Poems by John Keats
- Bright Star (14 lines) – A sonnet of steadfast love.
- On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (14 lines) – The thrill of discovering a great book, like seeing the Pacific for the first time.
More: All John Keats poems
Short Famous Poems by Walt Whitman
- O Me! O Life! (10 lines) – What good is life? “That you are here.”
- A Noiseless Patient Spider (11 lines) – A spider casting threads into space, like the soul reaching out.
- When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (9 lines) – He leaves the lecture hall and looks up at the stars in silence.
- I Hear America Singing (12 lines) – Mechanics, carpenters, and mothers, each singing their own song.
More: All Walt Whitman poems
Short Famous Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
- Eldorado (24 lines) – A knight spends his life searching for the land of gold.
More: All Edgar Allan Poe poems
Short Famous Poems by G.K. Chesterton
- The Donkey (16 lines) – The scorned donkey remembers its one great hour: Palm Sunday.
- Ecclesiastes (8 lines) – Eight lines: “There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey.”
More: All G.K. Chesterton poems
Short Famous Poems by Robert Burns
- A Red, Red Rose (16 lines) – “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June.”
- My Heart’s in the Highlands (13 lines) – A farewell to the mountains: “My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.”
- A Grace Before Dinner, Extempore (8 lines) – A mealtime grace: “But, whether granted, or denied, / Lord, bless us with content.”
More: All Robert Burns poems
Short Famous Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- The Eagle (6 lines) – The eagle on his mountain wall watches the “wrinkled sea” below, then “like a thunderbolt he falls.”
- Crossing the Bar (16 lines) – A calm farewell to life, pictured as putting out to sea: “Twilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark!”
- Flower in the Crannied Wall (6 lines) – The poet holds a small flower “root and all” and says that if he could understand it, “I should know what God and man is.”
More: All Alfred, Lord Tennyson poems
Short Famous Poems by John Milton
- On His Blindness (14 lines) – “When I consider how my light is spent,” Milton asks whether God demands work from a man denied light, and answers in the famous last line: “They also serve who only stand and waite.”
More: All John Milton poems
See also: Poems for Kids, Love Poems, Poems About Death