Poetry Books – Classic Poetry Books

Experience poetry as an educated reader: Here are our collections of classic poems to read to help you understand how poems work their magic. The list on this page include some of the greatest poets of all time.

Catullus: the greatest of Latin lyric poets. Catullus is, with Sappho, one of the world’s best and most influential love poets. Since so much more of his work has survived, he is far better known than Sappho, and has been a major influence in lyric poetry throughout the west.
Homer: author of the epic poems The Iliad, The Odyssey. The date of Homer’s existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today.
Horace: Horace is generally considered to stand alongside Virgil and Ovid as one of the greatest poets of the Augustan Age. Several of his poetry’s main themes, such as the beatus ille (an apraisal of simple life) and carpe diem (literally “pluck the day”, more commonly rendered into English as “seize the day”, but perhaps closer to “enjoy the day”) were recovered during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, influencing poets such as Petrarca and Dante.
Li Po: a Chinese poet. He was part of the group of Chinese scholars called the “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” in a poem by fellow poet Du Fu. Li Bai is often regarded, along with Du Fu, as one of the two greatest poets in China’s literary history. Approximately 1,100 of his poems remain today.
Ovid: Author of Metamorphoses, considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature and remains as one of the most important sources of classical mythology.
Sappho is the legendary Greek love poet whose work was admired by the ancients, burned in the middle ages, and still speaks to us 25 centuries later in the few fragments that remain for us to read.
Virgil: The son of a farmer, Virgil came to be regarded as one of Rome’s greatest poets. His Aeneid can be considered a national epic of Rome and has been extremely popular from its publication to the present day.