Category: 19th century poets

  • All-World Wrestling Poetry—a collection of 52 wrestling poems

    _____         _____     The poems in this collection are on wrestling—the collegiate and amateur styles—but also how we wrestle with life, where we find wrestling in our lives, plus our gods, prophets and heroes past, those who have wrestled the classic bouts. It is modern and boundary-busting, and at the…

  • . . . and don’t forget these Christmas poems

                      Anonymous   At the Last         The stream is calmest when it nears the tide,       And flowers are sweetest at eventide,       The birds most musical at close of day,       The saints divinest when they…

  • Ten Thousand Thanks

    _____         Thank you ten thousand times. Just a few hours ago, the most popular post yet here at Clattery MacHinery on Poetry, Alley War Poetry, received its 10,000th hit. That’s a lot of readers for a poetry blog post. I’ve had ten thousand thoughts come and go, about how good or…

  • The Long Abandon’d Hill, for Frank Wilson as he retires

    ~~~~~       It is not quite right to say that Frank Wilson, books editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, is retiring today. It is better to say that The Inquirer is retiring. In parts of the world where there is tyrannical rule, our journalists and poets are politically silenced as threats, because they start…

  • Lite Verse with No Cholesterol or Trans Fat, by 33 Already Dead Poets, 6 Unknown Anyway

    ~~~~~       The following poems are selected from the 1920 collection The Book of Humorous Verse, edited by Carolyn Wells (1862-1942).    Each poet is represented only once, and in alphabetical order. However, links are provided so that you can investigate each one.   ~~~~~       by L. J. Bridgman (1857-1931)…

  • A Selection of Kitten Verse by Oliver Herford

    _____           Oliver Herford was born in Sheffield, England in 1863 and moved with his family to Chicago, Illinois when he was twelve, then onto Boston seven years later. After schooling back in England and then in Ohio, he moved to New York City with his wife Margaret Regan, where he…

  • The Long-Awaited, Unabating, Top 30 All-Time Greatest Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

    _____ Below is a countdown of the top 30 poems written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872, and died there in 1906. The poems included here are very enjoyable and speak very well to the world, some through dialect. They show Dunbar to be unique, important, and universal by…