William Shakespeare (1564–1616) — passage of time, love, jealousy
John Donne (1572–1631) — religion, love, faith
William Blake (1757–1827) — vocation, religion
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) — death, endurance, and grief
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) — theological, political, nature
George Gordon (Lord Byron) (1788–1824) — nature, satirical, love, loss
Percy Shelley (1792–1822) — love and sorrow, nature, politics
John Keats (1795–1821) — friendship, human nature, life/death
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) — slavery, love, feminism, spirituality
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) — horror fiction, adventure, detective fiction
Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) — mythology, loss and grief, nature
Robert Browning (1812–1889) — love, dramatic, morality
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) — loss and healing, democracy and equality
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) — loss, longing, faith, doubt
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) — unrequited love, sexuality, death, faith in God
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) — death, nature, love, spirituality
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) — war, love, loss, time
A.E. Housman (1859–1936) — unrequited love, grief, fleeting youth
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) — spirituality, nature, and humanism
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) — love, longing and loss, Irish myths
Robert Frost (1874–1963) — human vs nature, natural world
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) — imagination vs. reality
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) — spirituality, love, loss, drinking
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) — time, death/rebirth, quest for meaning
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) — inhumanity of war and its impact
E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) — love, nature, individualism
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) — love, self-discovery, poetry itself
Langston Hughes (1901–1967) — struggles of everyday life, racial injustice
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) — longing, desire, loss, and search for identity
W.H. Auden (1907–1973) — love, political/science themes, war
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) — life and death, individual growth, appreciation for nature
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) — her sexuality, family relationships, loneliness
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) — life and death, love and loss, childhood nostalgia
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) — black pride, black identity/solidarity, love
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) — sexuality, political dissent, mental illness
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) — strength of women, human spirit, black beauty
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) — death, patriarchy, motherhood
Marge Piercy (1936 - present) — political activism, Jewish heritage
Billy Collins (1941–present) — love, death, mortality
Bob Dylan (1941–present) — social commentary, love
Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952–present) — social justice, addiction, community
Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) — racism, violence, and social injustice
