Who are the best poetry authors?

The best-known poetry authors here, ranked by how widely they are read and written about, are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dante Alighieri, Confucius, Rabindranath Tagore and Isaac Newton.

What are the best poetry series?

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese and Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland by Zachris Topelius — each listed in reading order.

Can I read poetry books for free?

Yes. 2,160 poetry books by these authors are in the public domain in the US and free to read here.

Poetry authors and series

The best-known poetry authors are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dante Alighieri and Confucius. Below are all 596 poetry writers in the directory, their series in reading order, and 2,160 of their books free to read.

Authors: 596
Series: 5
Free to read: 2,160

Best-known poetry authors

Poetry series in reading order

All series

Free poetry classics

All free classics

Erotica Romana
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
The Analects of Confucius (from the Chinese Classics)
Confucius
The Sayings of Confucius
Confucius
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore
Stories from Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Opticks
Isaac Newton
Newton's Principia
Isaac Newton
Ulysses
James Joyce
Dubliners
James Joyce
The Tao Teh King, or the Tao and its Characteristics
Laozi
Dao De Jing
Laozi

Classic poetry authors

All poetry authors

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 45 books
Dante Alighieri 10 books
Confucius 1 books
Rabindranath Tagore 63 books
Isaac Newton 0 books
James Joyce 29 books
J. R. R. Tolkien 52 books
Laozi 1 books
Lord Byron 29 books
Michelangelo 0 books
Virgil 1 books
Ovid 4 books
Geoffrey Chaucer 2 books
Henrik Ibsen 37 books
Friedrich Schiller 27 books
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 11 books
Kalidasa 15 books
Aesop 4 books
T. S. Eliot 59 books
Kahlil Gibran 27 books
William Blake 17 books
Aldous Huxley 63 books
W. B. Yeats 61 books
Ralph Waldo Emerson 27 books
Charlotte Brontë 7 books
Murasaki Shikibu 2 books
Walt Whitman 13 books
Emily Brontë 3 books
John Milton 14 books
Omar Khayyam 1 books
Emily Dickinson 4 books
William Wordsworth 15 books
Thomas Hardy 38 books
Charles Baudelaire 6 books
Pythagoras 0 books
John Keats 4 books
Jean de La Fontaine 41 books
Horace 3 books
Samuel Johnson 20 books
Heinrich Heine 11 books
Rainer Maria Rilke 24 books
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 14 books
Li Bai 0 books
Pablo Neruda 44 books
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 23 books
Percy Bysshe Shelley 20 books
D. H. Lawrence 53 books
Stefan Zweig 43 books
Petrarch 8 books
Alexander Pope 11 books
Maya Angelou 37 books
Hesiod 1 books
Robert Frost 40 books
Alfred, Lord Tennyson 43 books
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 32 books
Giordano Bruno 3 books
Ezra Pound 74 books
Adam Mickiewicz 5 books
Ḥāfiẓ 1 books
Anne Brontë 4 books
Christopher Marlowe 8 books
Fernando Pessoa 7 books
Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi 0 books
Firdawsi 1 books
Ben Jonson 21 books
O. Henry 20 books
Giacomo Leopardi 8 books
Luís de Camões 2 books
John Donne 7 books
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 15 books
Lucretius 1 books
Tupac Shakur 2 books
Muhammad Iqbal 15 books
Arthur Rimbaud 4 books
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 8 books
Robert Browning 26 books
Sappho 0 books
John Dryden 28 books
Paul Verlaine 6 books
Robert Burns 5 books
Czesław Miłosz 27 books
Langston Hughes 52 books
Gertrude Stein 45 books
Robert Graves 66 books
Aleister Crowley 49 books
Edmund Spenser 6 books
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 15 books
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 21 books
Joseph Brodsky 14 books
George Santayana 35 books
Juvenal 1 books
Alphonse de Lamartine 13 books
Ludovico Ariosto 4 books
Stephen Crane 13 books
Matthew Arnold 38 books
Oliver Goldsmith 15 books
Frédéric Mistral 3 books
Torquato Tasso 3 books
Baháʼu'lláh 13 books
Abu Nuwas 0 books
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 5 books
Seamus Heaney 31 books
Valmiki 11 books
Louise Glück 19 books
George Meredith 30 books
Hilaire Belloc 99 books
Catullus 0 books
W. H. Auden 45 books
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 19 books
John Dos Passos 40 books
Giosuè Carducci 1 books
Dorothy Parker 16 books
Allen Ginsberg 34 books
Thomas Moore 16 books
Christina Rossetti 14 books
Julio Cortázar 26 books
William Carlos Williams 29 books
Derek Walcott 26 books
Philip Sidney 4 books
Lucan 1 books
Peter Handke 32 books
Alfred de Vigny 5 books
Robert Southey 23 books
Charles Lamb 13 books
Tommaso Campanella 1 books
Edna St. Vincent Millay 14 books
Edward Bernays 9 books
William Hazlitt 16 books
Tomas Tranströmer 11 books
William Cowper 6 books
Eça de Queiroz 14 books
Vita Sackville-West 42 books
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer 3 books
Algernon Charles Swinburne 40 books
Edward Lear 10 books
E. E. Cummings 26 books
Edna Ferber 30 books
Sarojini Naidu 9 books
Erasmus Darwin 9 books
Kabir 1 books
Gottfried Keller 5 books
Henry van Dyke Jr. 67 books
John Masefield 78 books
Marina Tsvetaeva 3 books
Pindar 2 books
Apollonius of Rhodes 1 books
Mahmoud Darwish 10 books
Ronald Ross 5 books
Ramon Llull 13 books
Richard Aldington 27 books
Audre Lorde 20 books
Eleanor Farjeon 48 books
Walter Crane 44 books
James Russell Lowell 22 books
Siegfried Sassoon 25 books
H. D. 18 books
Jami 1 books
Edward Young 19 books
Jaroslav Seifert 3 books
A. E. Housman 9 books
Solon 0 books
Clement Clarke Moore 5 books
Walter de la Mare 49 books
Wilhelm Busch 5 books
Nikolay Nekrasov 2 books
Heinrich Hoffmann 2 books
Vera Brittain 26 books
Wilfred Owen 4 books
Lady Gregory 16 books
W. S. Gilbert 18 books
Thomas Gray 3 books
Phillis Wheatley 2 books
Isaac Watts 24 books
Kate Greenaway 9 books
Olive Schreiner 8 books
James Macpherson 9 books
Émile Verhaeren 13 books
Sara Teasdale 10 books
Leigh Hunt 28 books
Sergei Yesenin 1 books
Aubrey Beardsley 7 books
Michael Ondaatje 19 books
Sebastian Brant 1 books
Tristan Tzara 3 books
Stephen Vincent Benét 21 books
John Greenleaf Whittier 22 books
Ted Hughes 44 books
Edwin Arlington Robinson 18 books
Marianne Moore 11 books
Charles Godfrey Leland 26 books
James Weldon Johnson 13 books
Dmitry Merezhkovsky 4 books
Henry Lawson 8 books
Mika Waltari 14 books
Conrad Aiken 32 books
Adrienne Rich 26 books
Claude McKay 14 books
Bernard Mandeville 5 books
Amy Lowell 8 books
Walter Savage Landor 9 books
Thomas Hood 8 books
Shel Silverstein 21 books
George Borrow 10 books
Mary Oliver 35 books
Mary Mapes Dodge 8 books
Ivan Krylov 8 books
Robert Penn Warren 32 books
William Cullen Bryant 10 books
Cesare Pavese 12 books
Edgar Lee Masters 20 books
Amrita Pritam 15 books
Natalie Clifford Barney 2 books
Theocritus 1 books
Paul Laurence Dunbar 15 books
Antonio Machado 7 books
Edith Sitwell 21 books
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 15 books
Arthur Waley 19 books
George Crabbe 8 books
Ivan Franko 4 books
Anne Sexton 17 books
Vachel Lindsay 11 books
Jan Kochanowski 3 books
Vuk Karadžić 1 books
Hélène Cixous 20 books
Samuel Butler 9 books
Gerard Manley Hopkins 4 books
Serj Tankian 3 books
Arthur Symons 32 books
Randolph Caldecott 15 books
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 4 books
Valery Bryusov 2 books
Yevgeny Yevtushenko 5 books
Edward Thomas 22 books
Gwendolyn Brooks 23 books
José Zorrilla 1 books
Khushwant Singh 53 books
Richard Hughes 23 books
Banjo Paterson 10 books
Nikolay Karamzin 4 books
Jean Toomer 2 books
Esaias Tegnér 8 books
Persius 0 books
Joost van den Vondel 1 books
Constantine P. Cavafy 1 books
Abu al-Ala al-Maarri 0 books
Wolfram von Eschenbach 0 books
George Chapman 5 books
Robert Herrick 1 books
George William Russell 11 books
Andrea Camilleri 38 books
Countee Cullen 10 books
Philip Larkin 14 books
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton 15 books
William Ernest Henley 7 books
John Clare 5 books
Claudian 0 books
Carmen Sylva 0 books
Robin Morgan 16 books
Lawrence Ferlinghetti 37 books
Kostis Palamas 4 books
Mihai Eminescu 2 books
W. H. Davies 13 books
Alejandra Pizarnik 6 books
Paul Bowles 22 books
Anne Desclos 4 books
Wendell Berry 64 books
Matteo Maria Boiardo 1 books
Felicia Hemans 24 books
Faxian 1 books
John Hay 15 books
George Herbert 1 books
Aleksis Kivi 2 books
Zachris Topelius 10 books
Ocean Vuong 5 books
Caroline Kennedy 10 books
Robert Bridges 11 books
Fyodor Tyutchev 0 books
Osbert Sitwell 47 books
Michael D. Higgins 0 books
Francis Thompson 10 books
Carol Ann Duffy 20 books
Garcilaso de la Vega 0 books
Harold Acton 10 books
Jane Wilde 3 books
Ivan Vazov 5 books
José de Espronceda 0 books
Pierre Louÿs 0 books
E. Pauline Johnson 4 books
Clive Bell 6 books
Edward FitzGerald 21 books
Nathaniel Parker Willis 19 books
John McCrae 1 books
Cecil Day-Lewis 47 books
William Allingham 14 books
Sidney Lanier 6 books
Gaius Lucilius 0 books
Emma Lazarus 1 books
Thomas Campbell 24 books
Gary Snyder 20 books
Adelaide Anne Procter 8 books
Ernesto Cardenal 11 books
Rupert Brooke 3 books
Joel Barlow 11 books
James Beattie 9 books
Robert Bly 28 books
John Ashbery 25 books
Michael Drayton 7 books
John Keble 9 books
Jane Taylor 6 books
Laura Riding 13 books
John Gower 0 books
Robert W. Wood 3 books
René Char 4 books
Forugh Farrokhzad 1 books
Coventry Patmore 7 books
Nikki Giovanni 32 books
Charles Simic 18 books
Alfonso X of Castile 1 books
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy 8 books
Janis Ian 4 books
Nadezhda Mandelstam 3 books
Diane di Prima 10 books
William Roscoe 18 books
Ogden Nash 29 books
Robert Lowell 15 books
Nicanor Parra 4 books
Frank O'Hara 12 books
Amber Tamblyn 6 books
Konstantin Simonov 3 books
José Hernández 1 books
Rafael Alberti 9 books
William Michael Rossetti 10 books
Keri Hulme 5 books
Rita Dove 17 books
Yoko Tawada 11 books
Tibullus 0 books
Tulsidas 0 books
Prudentius 1 books
Gavrila Derzhavin 0 books
Ján Kollár 0 books
Statius 2 books
Eduard Limonov 2 books
John Marston 4 books
Roger Casement 7 books
Edwin Arnold 0 books
John Betjeman 16 books
Adam Oehlenschläger 2 books
Theodore Roethke 10 books
Mark Strand 12 books
W. S. Merwin 23 books
Ernest Dowson 11 books
Yehuda Amichai 11 books
Thomas Chatterton 7 books
Samuel Daniel 2 books
James Montgomery Flagg 4 books
Cao Cao 0 books
Amy Levy 4 books
William Langland 0 books
Zinaida Gippius 4 books
John Berryman 12 books
Samuil Marshak 4 books
John Lydgate 2 books
Bulat Okudzhava 3 books
Uwe Timm 5 books
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 23 books
Lord Alfred Douglas 12 books
Alexander Griboyedov 2 books
Vasily Zhukovsky 1 books
Denise Levertov 18 books
T. E. Hulme 2 books
Quintus Smyrnaeus 0 books
George Cruikshank 0 books
Mathilde Blind 11 books
Thomas Nashe 3 books
Toru Dutt 3 books
John Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll 18 books
Paul Gerhardt 2 books
Richard Wilbur 14 books
Bion of Smyrna 0 books
Moschus 0 books
Silius Italicus 1 books
Michael S. Hart 1 books
Robinson Jeffers 12 books
I. L. Peretz 0 books
Leandro Fernández de Moratín 2 books
Richard Lovelace 1 books
Franklin P. Adams 11 books
Jacopone da Todi 2 books
Ivan Cankar 6 books
James I of Scotland 0 books
Washington Allston 5 books
Andrei Voznesensky 5 books
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington 14 books
Naomi Shihab Nye 36 books
Ibrahim Rugova 0 books
Ausonius 0 books
Bella Akhmadulina 2 books
James Legge 0 books
Ralph Chaplin 6 books
Izumi Shikibu 0 books
Richard Crashaw 2 books
Isaac Rosenberg 3 books
Chris Abani 7 books
R. S. Thomas 14 books
Lina Kostenko 1 books
Ivo Sanader 0 books
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester 9 books
Luis Cernuda 3 books
Alice Meynell 0 books
Johan Ludvig Runeberg 3 books
James Whitcomb Riley 0 books
Kofi Awoonor 6 books
Saul Williams 4 books
Sergey Mikhalkov 0 books
Marlo Thomas 7 books
Wallace Tripp 8 books
Cynewulf 0 books
Thomas Traherne 0 books
Robert W. Service 0 books
Daniel Garrison Brinton 0 books
Tomás de Iriarte 0 books
Guillaume de Machaut 0 books
Velimir Khlebnikov 0 books
Sulpicia 0 books
Vidyapati 0 books
Henry Vaughan 0 books
Susan Coolidge 0 books
José Emilio Pacheco 3 books
Shinran 0 books
Gilbert Murray 0 books
Lydia Koidula 0 books
Stanley Kunitz 11 books
Svatopluk Čech 0 books
Hugh MacDiarmid 12 books
Elizabeth F. Ellet 0 books
Alfred Noyes 0 books
Aneirin 0 books
Hanns Heinz Ewers 5 books
Eugene Field 0 books
Alice Dunbar Nelson 0 books
Philippe Soupault 4 books
Joyce Kilmer 0 books
Philip Freneau 0 books
John Gould Fletcher 0 books
John Barbour 0 books
James Stephens 0 books
Philip Levine 7 books
Alice Duer Miller 0 books
Juan José Saer 2 books
Denis of Portugal 0 books
Charles Maurras 1 books
Naim Frashëri 0 books
Hannah Szenes 2 books
Vítězslav Hálek 1 books
Cristina Peri Rossi 3 books
Mary Howitt 0 books
John Skelton 1 books
Layamon 0 books
Anne Bradstreet 1 books
Kenji Miyazawa 4 books
Mary Robinson 13 books
Allan Cunningham 0 books
James Thomson 0 books
José María Heredia y Heredia 0 books
Arseny Tarkovsky 1 books
Arthur Hugh Clough 0 books
Andrejs Pumpurs 1 books
DuBose Heyward 0 books
Laurence Binyon 0 books
John Wilson 0 books
Hervey Allen 0 books
Cao Pi 0 books
Edith Södergran 0 books
Juan Gelman 1 books
William Barnes 0 books
Mirza Fatali Akhundov 4 books
Bo Carpelan 3 books
Charles Churchill 0 books
Dimitris Lyacos 3 books
Nicolás Guillén 2 books
Lascelles Abercrombie 0 books
Alcman 0 books
Bacchylides 0 books
Edwin Markham 0 books
Sugawara no Takasue no Musume 0 books
6th Dalai Lama 0 books
Afanasy Fet 0 books
Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani 0 books
Alan Seeger 0 books
Frances Ridley Havergal 0 books
Edmund Waller 0 books
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson 0 books
Ki no Tsurayuki 1 books
Lola Ridge 0 books
Robert Blair 0 books
Thomas Wyatt 1 books
Theobald I of Navarre 0 books
Jayadeva 0 books
Blaga Dimitrova 3 books
Aelia Eudocia 0 books
Stesichorus 0 books
Gregory of Narek 0 books
Imru' al-Qais 0 books
Venantius Fortunatus 0 books
Fanny Crosby 5 books
Ono no Komachi 0 books
María Zambrano 0 books
Maximilian Voloshin 0 books
Vyacheslav Ivanov 1 books
Hermann of Reichenau 0 books
Vittoria Colonna 0 books
Aleksandr Tvardovsky 1 books
Aleksey Koltsov 0 books
Chairil Anwar 0 books
Jorge Guillén 1 books
Andreas Gryphius 1 books
Holger Drachmann 1 books
Francisco Martínez de la Rosa 0 books
Emperor Go-Toba 0 books
Hipponax 0 books
Nikolay Zabolotsky 1 books
Romanos the Melodist 0 books
Dámaso Alonso 0 books
Fujiwara no Teika 0 books
Jacint Verdaguer 2 books
Ion Creangă 2 books
Juana de Ibarbourou 0 books
Martin Opitz 1 books
Federigo Tozzi 2 books
Olga Berggolts 0 books
Aspazija 0 books
Lycophron 0 books
Agniya Barto 0 books
Paulinus of Nola 0 books
Jean Chapelain 0 books
Gennadiy Aygi 1 books
Guido Guinizelli 0 books
Ai Qing 1 books
Bertran de Born 0 books
Táhirih 0 books
George Wharton Edwards 0 books
Erinna 0 books
Alonso de Ercilla 1 books
Alexander Sumarokov 1 books
Saigyō 1 books
Anyte 0 books
Subramania Bharati 0 books
Innokenty Annensky 0 books
Elisaveta Bagryana 1 books
Sankardev 0 books
Nikolay Ogarev 0 books
Ivan Mažuranić 2 books
Eustache Deschamps 0 books
Paula von Preradović 0 books
Luigi Capuana 1 books
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 1 books
Amir Hamzah 1 books
Mikhail Kuzmin 2 books
Edmond Jabès 1 books
Fulbert of Chartres 0 books
Concepción Arenal 0 books
Mikhail Isakovsky 0 books
Imad al-Din al-Isfahani 0 books
Orhan Veli Kanık 0 books
Lucrezia Tornabuoni 0 books
Julio Baghy 0 books
Dmitry Bykov 0 books
Amado Nervo 0 books
Herbert Achternbusch 0 books
Titus Calpurnius Siculus 1 books
Conrad Celtes 0 books
Davit Guramishvili 1 books
Abdallah ibn al-Mu'tazz 0 books
Aasmund Olavsson Vinje 0 books
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan 0 books
Li Yu 0 books
Petter Dass 0 books
Friedrich Christian Diez 3 books
Igor Severyanin 0 books
Vladislav Khodasevich 0 books
August Ahlqvist 0 books
Hilde Domin 1 books
Nemesianus 0 books
Konstantin Ivanov 1 books
Abbasgulu Bakikhanov 1 books
Bhanubhakta Acharya 1 books
Turlough O'Carolan 0 books
Walafrid Strabo 0 books
Moderata Fonte 0 books
Nikolai Aseyev 0 books
Salomėja Nėris 1 books
Paul the Silentiary 0 books
Juvencus 0 books
Wilhelm Küchelbecker 0 books
Fernando de Herrera 0 books

Poetry FAQ

Who are the best poetry authors?: The best-known poetry authors here, ranked by how widely they are read and written about, are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dante Alighieri, Confucius, Rabindranath Tagore and Isaac Newton.
What are the best poetry series?: The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese and Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland by Zachris Topelius — each listed in reading order.
Can I read poetry books for free?: Yes. 2,160 poetry books by these authors are in the public domain in the US and free to read here.

Best-known poetry authors

J. R. R. Tolkien

Kalidasa

T. S. Eliot

Aldous Huxley

Pablo Neruda

Maya Angelou

Ezra Pound

Tupac Shakur

Czesław Miłosz

Langston Hughes

Robert Graves

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Joseph Brodsky

Seamus Heaney

Valmiki

Louise Glück

W. H. Auden

John Dos Passos

Poetry series in reading order

Free poetry classics

Classic poetry authors

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Dante Alighieri

Confucius

Rabindranath Tagore

Isaac Newton

James Joyce

Laozi

Lord Byron

Michelangelo

Virgil

Ovid

Geoffrey Chaucer

Henrik Ibsen

Friedrich Schiller

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Aesop

Kahlil Gibran

William Blake

All poetry authors

Poetry FAQ