Pagine128 great poets from Homer to Langston Hughes: who they were, what they wrote, and 167 public-domain poems to read free. 35 poets have a collection you can read as a book.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," quod I, "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."
Selected public-domain poems, laid out like a book you can flip.
Read-aloud favourites for home and class.
The epics and odes of Greece, Rome and India.
Pilgrims, journeys and the birth of poetry in everyday languages.
Sonnets, songs and the metaphysical poets.
Nature, imagination and feeling, around 1780–1830.
Britain in the age of Tennyson, the Brontës and Hopkins.
Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Longfellow and Emerson.
The early 20th century: Yeats, Frost, Hughes, Millay and more.
Mystics and sages of Persia, India, China, Japan and Europe.
Poets whose work is still in copyright: biographies and where to read them legally.
Full public-domain collections and epics, free to read.
A Child’s Garden of VersesRobert Louis StevensonWhen we were very youngA. A. MilneClassicWhen we were very youngA. A. MilneNow we are sixA. A. MilneClassicNow we are sixA. A. MilnePoems of childhoodEugene FieldClassicPoems of childhoodEugene Field
The Song of HiawathaHenry Wadsworth LongfellowLeaves of GrassWalt WhitmanClassicLeaves of GrassWalt WhitmanGitanjaliRabindranath TagoreClassicGitanjaliRabindranath TagoreThe ProphetKahlil GibranClassicThe ProphetKahlil GibranThe Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyamOmar KhayyamClassicThe Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyamOmar KhayyamThe Pied Piper of HamelinRobert BrowningClassicThe Pied Piper of HamelinRobert BrowningThe Divine ComedyDante AlighieriClassicThe Divine ComedyDante AlighieriPoem texts here are in the public domain in the United States. Biographies are our own short summaries. Poets whose work is still in copyright have profile pages with links to their publishers, libraries and sites that share their poems with permission. The poetry books are reading editions of public-domain poems and are not Pagine Originals.
Yes. Every poem on Pagine is in the public domain, so you can read, print and share it free. For 30 contemporary poets whose work is still in copyright, we give a biography and links to legal places to read their poems instead of the poems themselves.
For 35 poets we have gathered their public-domain poems into a short collection you can flip through like a book, with a cover, contents and one poem to a page.
Their poems are still protected by copyright. Their pages list their books and point to the Poetry Foundation, poets.org and your library, which share or lend them legally.
We start with the poems most often taught and read aloud, then check each one is in the public domain in the United States (generally, published before 1930).
Start with the poets for children: Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti, then try Frost, Dickinson and Langston Hughes.
Track your reading, save favourites and read offline in the free Pagine app.