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.

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, Niccolo	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	The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Hamilton, John, et al.	The Federalist Papers

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" and "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," and "Lyrical Ballads" (with S.T. Coleridge)
Hughes, Langston	"Theme for English B" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"