Some time ago, I introduced Standard eBooks. This group takes releases of public domain books and cleans them up, edits them, adds a nice title and standard formatting updated to modern standards, and releases them in a very professional manner, making them look much much nicer than anything you will find on Project Gutenberg, and in many cases even nicer than eBooks you buy on the Kindle store. They do all of this for free. It is an incredible resource.

Anyway, I just got their newsletter for the latest releases, and a number of poetry books were released this time. I thought I'd point them out, tell why they are so great, and give you a link to each.

[NOTE: Since Hive gives us no ability to format, I'm just going to center all the poems. That doesn't necessarily make them look very good, but it does help them stand out.]

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

If you have heard of one book here, I'm better it's this one. Often hailed as America's first great poet and one of the most important ones, Whitman poetry is everywhere. Leaves of Grass was his magnum opus. I'm sure you know bits and pieces from the work. Like this one:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

or his famous tribute to Abraham

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

It's a long book and not always an easy read, but well worth keeping around on your Kindle or eReader of choice and flipping through every now and then.

Get it in a variety of formats here

Poetry – Oscar Wilde

This is another name I'm sure all of you have heard of before, although many of you might never have actually read anything by him. If you have, it was probably The Picture of Dorian Gray and not some of his poetry. But I bet you know this line:

men kill the thing they love

It's from the last stanza of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, included in this ebook. The full passage:

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

this book is full of great poems.

I too have had my dreams: ay, indeed known
The crowded visions of a fiery youth
Which haunt me still.

Like Leaves of Grass this one should be added to your eReader and thumbed through every now and then to see what jumps out at you.

Get it here

Poetry – Langston Hughes

Now we get into poets you may not have heard of. Hughes was a leading black poet in the 1920s. I only knew of one of his poems, his most famous one titled The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which begins:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

and ends with

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Flipping through the book, I see other gems. I love this one, titled Questions:

When the old junk man Death
Comes to gather up our bodies
And toss them into the sack of oblivion,
I wonder if he will find
The corpse of a white multi-millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity,
Than the black torso of
A Negro cotton-picker?

Get the full book here

Poetry – Fernando Pessoa

Now here's one I had never heard of. He was evidently famous for his prose in Portuguese literature, but he also wrote many poems in English, including a collection of sonnets that weren't well-received and a later collection that was much more highly praised. Of these praised ones is included one called Antinous which imagines Roman emperor Hadrean's perspective on his relationship with Antinous, a poem which has been highly praised.

The rain falls, and he lies like one who hath
Forgotten all the gestures of his love
And lies awake waiting their hot return.
But all his arts and toys are now with Death.
This human ice no way of heat can move;
These ashes of a fire no flame can burn.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fernando-pessoa/poetry

Get the book here

Anyway, there you go. I recommend them all. But if those do nothing for you, why not browse the poetry category on Standard Ebooks and see what else you can find.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.