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"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
                           —Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets.org currently features biographies of more than 500 poets, with new pages being added all the time.

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1. Langston Hughes

2. Robert Frost

3. Emily Dickinson

4. Walt Whitman

5. E. E. Cummings

6. William Carlos Williams

7. Edgar Allan Poe

8. Sylvia Plath

9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

10. T. S. Eliot

11. Gwendolyn Brooks

12. W. H. Auden

13. W. B. Yeats

14. William Shakespeare

15. William Wordsworth

16. Pablo Neruda

17. Robert Browning

18. Elizabeth Bishop

19. Dylan Thomas

20. Wallace Stevens

21. Federico García Lorca

22. John Keats

23. Carl Sandburg

24. Claude McKay

25. John Milton

Browse more popular lists >

1. Billy Collins
"The most popular poet in America," according to the New York Times

2. Nikki Giovanni
Grammy-nominated poet inspired by the civil rights and black power movements

3. Gary Soto
Award-winning Mexican American poet writing for adults and children

4. Charles Simic
Influential Serbian-American poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate

5. Elizabeth Alexander
Poet and scholar who read at President Obama's inauguration in 2009

6. Naomi Shihab Nye

7. Rita Dove

8. Mary Oliver

9. Kay Ryan

10. Adrienne Rich

11. John Ashbery

12. Yusef Komunyakaa

13. Mark Strand

14. Donald Hall

15. Louise Glück