Typical/well-known english poems?

Question

what are some typical poems you´d expect most english speaking people to have studied or know?

i was just wondering how true it is that people who speak the same language tend to have the same cultural background.... (basically i´m curious whether i´m going to get a bunch of similar answers or not!)

Answer 1

Hope by Emily Dickinson.

Answer 2

"To His Coy Mistress" (Marvell), Shakespeare's sonnets, the odes of Keats, "The Wild Swans at Coole" (Yeats), "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (Coleridge), Paradise Lost and "Lycidas" (Milton), Gray's "Elegy" etc.

Answer 3

First of all, most English speaking poeple haven't studied poetry outside of school.  So, it would depend on whether you're talking about an English speaking school in India, Singapore, the U.S. or Britain.  In the U.S., the most common poems, other than Shakespeare who's still "the Bard" all others are measured to, you have the usual suspects, such as:

Robert Frost (Stopping by a Winter wood, The Road Less Traveled)

E.A. Poe (The Raven, Annabelle Lee)

Longfellow (The Village Blacksmith)

Keats (Ode to a Grecian Urn)

Kipling (If, Gunga Din)

Shelly (Ozymandius)

Carroll (The Walrus and the Carpenter, Jabberwocky)

Coleridge (Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

Service (Cremation of Sam McGee)

...most English speaking people have either read, studied in school, or at least heard these poems at some time in their life...but the most "widely read" poem in the English language is still "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", by Fitzgerald.