The Best Poetry Books to Read, from Beowulf to Tom Bombadil
Poetry covers a lot of ground. This list runs from a 1,000 year old Old English epic to nonsense verse, narrative poems that most people meet at school, and children's rhymes that introduced one of the best known characters in English fiction.
The seven books below are ordered by how much interest our readers show in them. Each entry explains what the book actually is, who wrote it and what happens inside, so you can work out which one suits you before you buy or borrow a copy.
The Adventures Of Tom Bombadil
Published in 1962, this collection gathers 16 poems from Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, two of them featuring Tom Bombadil, the character Frodo meets in The Lord of the Rings. The rest are bestiary verse and fairy tale rhyme, and three of the poems also appear in The Lord of the Rings itself. The standout is The Sea-Bell, subtitled Frodos Dreme, which W. H. Auden considered Tolkien's best poem: a melancholic account of a journey to a strange land beyond the sea, drawing on medieval dream vision poetry and Irish immram poems. The book was first illustrated by Pauline Baynes and presents itself as a translation from the Red Book of Westmarch, with background on Middle-earth found nowhere else.
Twas The Night Before Christmas
Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas was published in 1823, and its opening line has given the poem its popular name. Its reach goes well beyond the page: Rankin/Bass produced an animated television special in 1974 built around it, which CBS aired every year until 1994. If you want one piece of Christmas verse on the shelf, this is the one that shaped how the season is pictured.
The Raven
First published in January 1845, Poe's narrative poem is known for its musicality, stylised language and supernatural atmosphere. A grieving narrator, reading forgotten lore by a dying fire, is visited by a raven that perches on a bust of Pallas and answers every question with one word: "nevermore". Poe said he built it methodically to work on critical and popular audiences alike, and explained how in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. He took the talking bird from Dickens's Barnaby Rudge and the metre from Elizabeth Barrett's Lady Geraldine's Courtship, then layered it with internal rhyme and alliteration. A fixture of school reading lists.
Beowulf: A Translation And Commentary
Tolkien translated the Old English epic into modern English prose between 1920 and 1926, but it stayed unpublished until his son Christopher edited it for release in 2014. The poem follows Beowulf, a Geat hero, as he comes to the aid of the Danish king Hroðgar against the monster Grendel, then Grendel's mother, and finally a dragon fifty years later. The translation is followed by Tolkien's commentary, which became the basis of his acclaimed 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, plus the previously unpublished Sellic Spell and two versions of The Lay of Beowulf. Scholars and critics welcomed it, though they doubted it would reach a wide general readership.
Eugene Onegin
Pushkin's novel in verse was serialised between 1825 and 1832, with the first complete edition appearing in 1833. It is a classic of Russian literature, and its bored St Petersburg dandy became the model for a whole line of Russian literary heroes, the so-called superfluous men. The story turns on Onegin's cold rejection of Tatyana's love letter, a duel that kills his friend Lensky, and a reckoning years later. Almost the entire work is written in 389 fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter with an unusual rhyme scheme now known as the Onegin stanza.
The Hunting Of The Snark
Subtitled An Agony, in Eight Fits, Carroll's nonsense poem was written between 1874 and 1876 and published by Macmillan in March 1876 with nine illustrations by Henry Holiday. A crew of ten, almost all described by words beginning with B, sail to a strange island to hunt a creature that may turn out to be a highly dangerous Boojum. It borrows eight portmanteau words from Jabberwocky, including bandersnatch, frumious and galumphing. Reviewers at the time found it strange, but the first printing ran to 10,000 copies and the poem was reprinted 17 times between 1876 and 1908.
When We Were Very Young
A. A. Milne's best-selling 1924 verse collection, illustrated by E. H. Shepard, with several poems later set to music by Harold Fraser-Simson. It opens with an introduction called "Just Before We Begin", which invites readers to decide for themselves who the narrator is, and suggests it might be Christopher Robin. The 38th poem, "Teddy Bear", first printed in Punch in February 1924, contains the first appearance of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Between them these seven cover most of what poetry can do: epic battle, grief, satire of high society, nonsense and nursery rhyme. Several are short enough to read in a sitting, which makes poetry an easier place to start than its reputation suggests.