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Poetry and Cultural and Historical Texts
Recommended for College-Bound Readers
The poetry and other texts below didn't fit neatly into the 101 Great Books list, but are worth reading again and again.
| Poetry |
| Author |
Title |
| Blake, William |
"London" and "The Tyger" |
| Keats, John |
"Ode on a Grecian Urn," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and "The Eve of St. Agnes" |
| Brooks, Gwendolyn |
"We Real Cool," "The Mother," and "The Bean Eaters" |
| Moore, Marianne |
"Marriage," "Poetry," and "The Fish" |
| Coleridge, Samuel Taylor |
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Frost at Midnight" |
| O'Hara, Frank |
"Why I Am Not a Painter," "The Day Lady Died," and "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed)" |
| Dickinson, Emily |
"There's a certain Slant of light" (258), "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (280), and "Because I could not stop for Death" (712) |
| Shakespeare, William |
Sonnets |
| Donne, John |
"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "Death, be not proud" (Holy Sonnet 10), and "The Flea" |
| Stein, Gertrude |
"Tender Buttons," "Stanzas in Meditation |
| Eliot, T.S. |
"The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" |
| Williams, William Carlos |
"The Red Wheelbarrow," "This is Just to Say," and "Spring and All" |
| Hopkins, Gerard Manley |
"God's Grandeur," "Windhover," and "Carrion Comfort" |
| Wordsworth, William |
"Tintern Abbey," "Prelude," "Lyrical Ballads" (with S.T. Coleridge) |
| Hughes, Langston |
"Theme for English B" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" |
| Classic Cultural and Historical Texts |
| Author |
Title |
| --- |
The Arabian Nights |
| Kennedy, John F. |
Profiles in Courage |
| --- |
The Bible |
| King, Martin Luther, Jr. |
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| Adams, Henry |
The Education of Henry Adams |
| Malory, Sir Thomas |
Le Morte D'Arthur |
| Aesop |
Aesop's Fables |
| Machiavelli, Niccolò |
The Prince |
| Andersen, Hans Christian |
Andersen's Fairy Tales |
| Marx, Karl |
The Communist Manifesto |
| Aristotle |
Nicomachean Ethics |
| Paine, Thomas |
Common Sense |
| DuBois, W.E.B. |
The Souls of Black Folk |
| Plato |
The Republic |
| Franklin, Benjamin |
Autobiography |
| Tocqueville, Alexis de |
Democracy in America |
| Hamilton, Edith |
Mythology |
| X, Malcolm with Haley, Alex |
The Autobiography of Malcolm X |
| Hamilton, John, et al. |
The Federalist Papers |
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