Here is an extensive list of 30 poetry books I highly recommend! You’ll find how-to’s on writing poetry, collections, and anthologies of poems.
Do you have poetry books that you’d recommend? Leave a comment below and let’s chat!
Books on Writing Poetry
Here are my top four reference poetry books that I use to write my poems. Complete with how-to’s, advice, and details on countless poetry forms.
Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
New Rhyming Dictionary and Poets Handbook by Burges Johnson
Modern American Poetry Edited by Louis Untermeyer
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A Book of Women poets from Antiquity to Now Edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone
Poetry Collections & Anthologies
These are some of my absolute favorite poetry collections and anthologies. They span the old and the new, and I just can’t get enough of them. If you’re looking to dive into poetry, I recommend you pick up one of these and give it a go!
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry Edited by J.D. McClatchy
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Selected Poems and Letter of Emily Dickinson Edited by Robert N. Linscott
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The New Modern American and British Poetry Edited by Louis Untermeyer
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen Edited by C. Day Lewis
The Faber Book of 20th Century Verse Edited by John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions Edited by Jeffrey Yang
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Ovid: the Metamorphoses Translated, and with an Introduction by Horace Gregory
Rilke: A Life by Wolfgang Leppmann
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell
The Odyssey Translated by Robert Fagles Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox
i six nonlectures by E.E. Cummings
Herman Hesse Poems Selected and Translated by James Wright
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat By Arthur Rimbaud Translated by Louise Varese
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 by Adrienne Rich
Selected Poetry of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
One Hundred Modern Poems selected with an introduction by Selden Rodman
Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry translated and compiled by Edith Marcombe Shiffert Yuki Sawa
No Nature: New and Selected Poems by Gary Snyder
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