National Poetry Day: 28 of the most powerful poetry lines ever written

Featuring selected works from the likes of TS Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Margaret Atwood, Walt Whitman and Wilfred Owen

Related video: Stephen Hawking reads “Relativity” By Sarah Howe

To celebrate National Poetry Day, here are a small collection of singular lines, stanzas, and notions possessing the power to spring the most moving of thoughts and feelings into the humming imagination of the reader.

Such poets as TS Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen are all included.

Other much-celebrated authors to feature include Margaret Atwood, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Maya Angelou.

Read on to see the 28 poetry lines The Independent has selected.

'Because I could not stop for Death', Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality

'To My Wife', Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

And when wind and winter harden / All the loveless land, / It will whisper of the garden, / You will understand

'Variation on the Word Sleep', Margaret Atwood

I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only. I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary

'The Hollow Men', TS Eliot

This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper

'Dulce et Decorum est', Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, /Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, / Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs / And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

'Sonnet XVII', Pablo Neruda

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved / in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

'the boys i mean are not refined', ee cummings

they speak whatever’s on their mind / they do whatever’s in their pants / the boys i mean are not refined / they shake the mountains when they dance

'Dark Pines Under Water', Gwendolyn MacEwen

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper / And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper / In an elementary world; There is something down there and you want it told

'O Captain! My Captain!', Walt Whitman

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; / The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won

'Cuz He’s Black', Javon Johnson

Don’t like the / fact that he learned to hide from the cops before he knew / how to read. Angrier that his survival depends more on his ability / to deal with the “authorities” than it does his own literacy

'Song', Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world / is love / Under the burden / of solitude, / under the burden / of dissatisfaction / the weight, / the weight we carry / is love

'I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings', Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill/ Of things unknown but longed for still/ And his tune is heard on the distant hill/ For the caged bird sings of freedom

The Second Coming', WB Yeats

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity 

'Lady Lazarus', Sylvia Plath

Out of the ash I rise / With my red hair / And I eat men like air

'Dirge Without Music', Edna St Vincent Millay

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave / Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; / Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. / I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned

'Leaves of Grass', Walt Whitman

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles

'Eloisa to Abelard', Alexander Pope

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot. / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd

'Sonnet 116', William Shakespeare

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests, and is never shake

'A Girl', Ezra Pound

Tree you are, / Moss you are, / You are violets with wind above them. / A child - so high - you are, / And all this is folly to the world

'Still I Rise', Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise

'The Unblinking Grief', Charles Bukowski

you are much more than simply dead/ I am a dish for your ashes / I am a fist for your vanished air / the most terrible thing about life/ is finding it gone

'Daddy', Sylvia Plath

At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do./ But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue

'Howl', Allan Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

'Masks', Shel Silverstein

She had blue skin,/ and so did he./ He kept it hid/ and so did she./ They looked for blue/ their whole life through./ Then passed right by--/ and never knew

'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Water, water, every where, / And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water, every where / Nor any drop to drink

'Let America Be America Again', Langston Hughes

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart / I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars / I am the red man driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek - / And finding only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak

'Suicide in the Trenches', Siegfried Sassoon

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, / Sneak home and pray you'll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go