A long time ago, this is one of the first poems I memorised. Louise MacNeice is often overlooked or undervalued in histories of English poetry where he is overshadowed by his friend W. H. Auden. But he was one of the great lyric poets writing in English in the twentieth century. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2007 Peter McDonald edited a beautiful collected for Faber. McDonald also contributed a fine discussion of this poem by to 'Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his legacy' essays edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Carcanet 2012).

Anon may well be the greatest poet in any language, This short lyric from the 15th Century belongs to the medieval tradition of celebrating Mary.

This poem is taken from Songs of a Sourdough. Robert Service made his name writing about the Yukon Gold Rush in the 1890s. 'The shooting of Dan McGrew' is best heard around a campfire, and best recited from memory. Service was once very popular, especially with people who 'didn't like poetry'.

This is from the title sequence of Boland's 2001 collection 'Against Love Poetry'. Her book makes a case for a poetry that deals with real, lived relationships, rather than the 'inexact praise' of conventional love poetry.

One of the great poems of the twentieth century, it's worth noting how much trouble both Eliot and Pound had in getting this published. Harriet Munroe apparently wanted Eliot to rewrite the poem to give it a more uplifting ending. Although written in irregular lines, the poem swings and it's hard to avoid reading it in a sing song chant, which I hope I have avoided.

One of the few poems I've found about Coventry.

It's not one of Kipling's best poems, but the punchline should be recited regularly by all those who write poems or write about them.

Laȝamon is one of the first English poets to identify himself clearly within his own text. In this prologue we learn where he was, who he was, what he was doing, and how and why he began writing his 16,000 line poem