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Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The snowy peak and riven Alpine landscape turn the Romantic poet to thoughts of meaning, perception and eternityShelley was just short of his 25th birthday when he began drafting "Mont Blanc" in July...
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Chain Ghazal: Chickens by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
Using repetition to splice two genres – the oriental ghazal and the blues – this humorous offering demonstrates the poet's joy in language and formThere's always a wealth of interesting new writing in...
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Poem of the week: Bird on a Briar by Anonymous
Whether sacred, profane – or both – the mystery of this poem remains immediately appealing some 700 years onThis week's poem is among the earliest surviving English love lyrics. "Bird on a Briar" or,...
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Poem of the week: When that I was and a little tiny boy by William Shakespeare
For 1 April, a sonorous refrain from one of literature's most plaintive fools, making plain the shadows behind the japesIt's not often that April Fool's Day and "Poem of the week Monday" coincide. So...
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Poem of the week: Autobiography Without Pronouns by Tiffany Atkinson
Swept clean of the 'I', this is poetry full of space and light and freewheeling observationThe title of this week's poem, "Autobiography Without Pronouns," from Kink and Particle by Tiffany Atkinson,...
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Poem of the week: The Overcoat by Peter McDonald
An atmospheric winter train ride connects the present to the past, and a father's experience to his son'sThe title of this week's poem, Peter McDonald's "The Overcoat" inevitably recalls Gogol's...
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Poem of the week: Night and Morning by Robert Browning
Two perspectives on either side of a nocturnal liaison make up a strikingly contrasting diptychThis week's choice is an intriguing diptych by Robert Browning. "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at...
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Poem of the week: Hymn of Hymns by John Rodker
Rodker's eclectic denunciation of religion's repressions, written after the first world war, is funny and unexpectedly sympatheticDon't believe the title of this week's poem. "Hymn of Hymns," by John...
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Poem of the week: Relational Epistemology by Heather Phillipson
Phillipson's humorous description of an intellectual family making a cake is leavened by her fondness for her subjectsThis week's poem, "Relational Epistemology" by Heather Phillipson, is almost as...
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Poem of the week: The Unquiet Grave
Concise and musical, this is one of the most popular versions of a much-reworked ballad of aching love and lossThis week's poem is among the most beautiful of the "Child" ballads. It's an unusually...
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Poem of the week: Sonnet 30 by Robert Sidney
A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical techniqueThis week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies...
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Poem of the week: Boy Soldier by Fred D'Aguiar
This shocking portrait of a child locked into a brutal cycle of war restrains its language, but its outrage is palpableThis week's poem "Boy Soldier" is by Fred D'Aguiar and comes from his new...
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Poem of the week: two cinquains by Adelaide Crapsey
The unjustly neglected early modernist developed from haiku her own form, a vessel for pared-down vernacular observationWhen a loved daughter was christened in Brooklyn Heights in 1878, the name...
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Poem of the week: The Fetching by Graham Mort
Mort's mythic poem of the sea is a story of creation overshadowed, a world where language cannot yet be trustedThis week's poem "The Fetching" is by Graham Mort and comes from his 2007 collection,...
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Luminary by RS Thomas: Poem of the week
With its melodious free verse, this love poem's imagery extends beyond an individual woman to wider natureAmong the publications marking the centenary of RS Thomas's birth in 1913, especially...
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Poem of the week: Pissarro's Orchards by Marianne Burton
An impressionist's manifesto for more naturalistic, less grandiose painting also makes the case for – and expresses – a more immediate poetryThis week, it's time to relax and enjoy a fruit-laden summer...
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Poem of the week: The Man by Maitreyabandhu
A quiet portrait of isolated life uses coolly observed, ordinary details to build an unexpectedly suspenseful narrativeThis week's poem "The Man" is by the Buddhist writer Maitreyabandhu, whose first...
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Poem of the week: An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope
Whilst counselling restraint, Pope's famously stinging wit is here trained on targets that can still be seen todayThis week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on...
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Poem of the week: Elegy by Sidney Keyes
Candid and unsentimental, the teenage poet's tribute to his departed grandfather is striking in its originalitySidney Keyes was a few weeks old when his mother died of peritonitis, and his father,...
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Poem of the week: Actaeon by George Szirtes
A version of the Greek myth, refocused through the eyes of an ageing 21st-century man, retells the story suggestively slantFrom Victorian times at least, women writers have been retelling classical...
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