Oh boy. If you ask me on a different day, I’d probably offer different

poems. Her’s a decent list, though.

Please note: these are not my favorite poems, or the greatest poems, or the

poems that I think best read out loud, or the most instructive or stirring

or uplifting or beautiful or sublime, or technically excellent, or anything

else but: poems suitable for memorizing. To be suitable for memorizing,

a poem needs to have certain particular qualities, which another poem–which

might be much better, taken all round–does not have.

OK, from shortest to longest (number of lines in parenthesis).

1. Tennyson, “The Eagle” (6)

2. Housman, “Into my heart an air that kills…” (8)

3. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (12)

4. Milton, “On His Blindness” (14)

5. Hopkins, “Felix Randal” (14)

6. Masefield, “Cargoes” (15)

7. Emerson, “Concord Hymn” (16)

8. Clough, “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” (16)

9. Byron, “She Walks in Beauty” (18)

10. Blake, “The Tiger” (24)

11. Newbolt, “Vitai Lampada” (24)

12. Shakespeare, “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun” (24)

13. Wordsworth, “Daffodils” (24)

14. Kipling, “Recessional” (30)

15. Wolfe, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna” (32)

16. Arnold, “Dover Beach” (37)

17. Poe, “Annabel Lee” (41)

18. Burns, “To a Mouse” (48)

19. Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (128)

20. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (145)