A Celebration of Poetry in the Collections

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed March 21 as World Poetry Day, and April has been proclaimed National Poetry Month by the Academy of American Poets. In recognition, explore our poetry-related collections and listen to poetry with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, December 25, 1858

Sandra Cisneros

Charles Olson

e.e. cummings

John Wieners

Robert Lowell

Amy Clampitt

Margaret Walker, from the portfolio 'O, Write My Name': American Portraits, Harlem Heroes

Sir Rabindranath Tagore

Edgar Allan Poe

Hilda Doolittle

Robert Louis Stevenson

W. H. Auden

Walt Whitman

Alan Dugan

May Swenson

Djuna Barnes

Aldous Huxley

Joyce Carol Oates

Roque Dalton

The Protagonist of an Endless Story

In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden)

Marianne Moore

e.e. cummings

Harold Hart Crane

James Weldon Johnson, from the portfolio 'O, Write My Name': American Portraits, Harlem Heroes

Ed Dorn

Ntozake Shange

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Stanley Kunitz

Marianne Moore

Robert Frost

Ezra Pound, poet

Kenneth Koch

For Love

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