36 Life Changing Poems Everyone Should Read

“Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” posted on April 19, 2014 at 9:57am EDT

Krystie Lee Yandoli BuzzFeed Staff 

. “MCMXIV” by Philip Larkin
“That poem by Larkin (and some others) taught me how direct and economical you can be with language, and about how modernity isn’t so great.”
—Ben Smith

2. “If” by Rudyard Kipling
“When I was growing up, my dad had a beautiful calligraphy copy of the poem on his bedroom wall, given to him by his father. Before we could read, he would read it to us, and once we began reading he encouraged us to practice by reading it aloud to him at night. The second stanza is the first part of anything I ever memorized. Dad not only had us read from it, but would ask us what we thought it meant. It’s got such a beautiful message of how to deal with life and those around you, how to temper yourself but not lose your joy. When I was a kid, my dad would change the last line for me and my sister to ‘and what’s more, you’ll be a woman my daughter’ and that just meant the world to me because yes, you can do all these things that a century ago made you a ‘man’ but you can own them as a woman.”
—Cates Holderness

3. “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka
“Really incredible poem. For me, it’s a perfect metaphor for feeling stuck in life, and learning how to push past that feeling. Everyone, at some point in their life, has felt this sort of sourceless sense of existential dread that comes along with routine. This poem captures that feeling, and reminds the reader to find joy and redemption in small moments.”
—Tanner Ringerud

4. “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
“This ‘Poetry Alive!’ group came to our middle school, and they did this awesome reading of ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe. We’d read it in class but I didn’t really understand it fully until I heard it read out loud, and it was just so morbidly strange and sad. It was the first time I took genuine interest in a poem — I’d always thought they were dry and difficult to relate to before that. I used it to audition for my first play in high school.”
—Keely Flaherty

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