After a successful polling of the British people’s favorite poems in 1995, in which twelve thousand people participated, the BBC continued to conduct polls to find out Britain’s most favorite poems of different kinds, for example, love poems, poems of celebration, children’s poems. Below is a list of Britain’s favorite twentieth century poems, polled and collected in an anthology in 1999. “Gathered together,” the editor says, is “a comprehensive selection of the finest verse of the last hundred years.” The list is not presented in order of popularity, i.e. highest number of votes; instead, the poems are grouped together by their affinity to themes suggested by quotes chosen by the editor from one of the poems in a group. The most popular poem in the 1995 collection, Kipling’s “If”, was not among the favorite poems named. The editor surmised that people polled might not realize that it was written in 1912 and therefore a 20th century poem. He included it anyway, and commissioned a new modern ironic poem “What If” to go with it. He also mentioned that “Warning” was the most voted for poem.
The list can serve as a guide for readers interested in knowing more about 20th century poems in English, largely those from Britain. Many of the poems are available online. See also the links 100 Favorite Poems of Britain, 100 Favorite Love Poems of Britain.
The Poems
Benjamin Zephaniah, What If (commissioned by the BBC)
Rudyard Kipling, If (the most popular poem in the 1995 poll)
‘His look was a lion’s,
Full of rage, defiance’
Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into the good night
Edmund Blunden, The Midnight Skaters
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
W.B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
John Hegley, Autumn Verses
Hal Summers, My Old Cat
Maya Angelou, Still I Rise
‘What will survive us is love’
Philip Larkin, An Arundel Tomb
E.E. Cummings, somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
Sir John Betjeman, A Subaltern’s Love-song
W.H. Auden, Carry Her Over the Water
Jon Stallworthy, The Almond Tree
Louis Macneice, Meeting Point
Adrian Henri, Without You
Anon, Footprints
Dylan Thomas, from Under Milk Wood
Stevie Smith, The Singing Cat
Edwin Morgan, Strawberries
Roger McGough, Vinegar
Sir John Betjeman, Myfanwy
W.B. Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
‘… we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, …’
Hugo Williams, Tides
Wendy Cope, Loss
Roger McGough, Comecolse and Sleepnow
Brian Patten, Portrait of a Young Girl Raped at a Suburban Party
Douglas Dunn, Modern Love
Alice Walker, Did this Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?
Philip Larkin, Deceptions
Brian Patten, A Blade of Grass
Wendy Cope, A Christmas Poem
‘In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair’
Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Philip Larkin, Toads
W.H. Auden, Night Mail
Philip Larkin, Going, Going
Robert Graves, Welsh Incident
Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
Sir John Betjeman, Slough
‘For human beings only do
What their religion tells them to’
Sir John Betjeman, In Westminster Abbey
Seamus Heaney, Follower
Charles Causley, Timothy Winters
Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse
A.E. Housman, In Valleys Green and Still
George Macbeth, The Miner’s Helmet
Charles Causley, Ballad of the Bread Man
Sir John Betjeman, Diary of a Church Mouse
‘Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews’
Laurie Lee, April Rise
Vernon Watkins, Peace in the Welsh Hills
D.H. Lawrence, Bavarian Gentians
R.S. Thomas, A Peasant
Ted Hughes, Wind
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Ted Hughes, The Horses
Laurence Binyon, The Burning of the Leaves
‘I believe life ends with death, and that is all’
Roger McGough, Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death
John McCrae, In Flanders Fields
Charles Causley, I saw a Jolly Hunter
Sir John Betjeman, Death in Leamington
Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break
Siegfried Sassoon, The Death-Bed
Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning
Ted Hughes, View of a Pig
Philip Larkin, Ambulances
Tony Harrison, Long Distance II
Jon Silkin, Death of a Son
Siegfried Sassoon, Base Details
Wilfred Own, The Send-off
W.H. Auden, Stop all the clocks (IX from Twelve Songs)
‘For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen’
R.S. Thomas, The Bright Field
Sheenagh Pugh, Sometimes
Sir John Betjeman, Christmas
Philip Larkin, Church Going
Carol Ann Duffy, Prayer
W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
Ted Hughes, The Thought-Fox
Benjamin Zephaniah, Dis Poetry
Seamus Heaney, Digging
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding (I)
G.K. Chesterton, The Rolling English Road
Laurie Lee, Christmas Landscape
Stephen Spender, I think continually of those who were truly great
‘Time held me green and dying’
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
Seamus Heaney, Blackberry-Picking
Thomas Hardy, ‘If It’s Ever Spring Again’
Dylan Thomas, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Gavin Ewart, A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter
Dylan Thomas, Poem in October
A.E. Housman, Into My Heart An Air That Kills
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’
Edwin Muir, The Horses
Roger McGough, At Lunchtime
Walter de la Mare, The Listeners
Adrian Mitchell, Fifteen Million Plastic Bags
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (II. A Game of Chess)
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
(The list is taken from the table of contents of The Nation’s Favorite Twentieth Century Poems, edited by Griff Rhys Jones, BBC Books, 1999, reprinted seven times by 2003. There are 99 poems in all.)