Poetry book series in reading order

by Walt Whitman

by Jorge Borges

by John Milton

by Helen Dunmore

by Eve Bunting

by Clark Ashton Smith

by Daniel Defoe

by Helen Dunmore

by Ezra Pound

by Giles Andreae

Charles Bukowski

75 books• 1 series

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was a German-American poet, novelist and short story writer whose work sits among the poor of Los Angeles. Alcohol, low-wage work, women and the act of writing are the recurring subjects. Bukowski also wrote the column Notes of a Dirty Old Man for the underground paper Open City. The catalogue holds 75 titles dated 1962 to 2019, from the poetry collection Run With the Hunted to later gatherings such as On Drinking. Poetry accounts for most of it, with the novel Post Office arriving in 1971.

Nikki Grimes, born October 20, 1950, is an American poet, journalist and author of books for children and young adults. The catalogue lists 75 books from Growin' (1977) to Twice Blessed (2026), and Meet Danitra Brown (1984) and Malcolm X (1992) are among them. Grimes's series are Dyamonde Daniel, Danitra Brown and Garvey. Catalogue subjects include children's poetry, African Americans, friendship, love, school and biography.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet whose subject was the natural world. The Pulitzer Prize came to Oliver in 1984, and the National Book Award followed in 1992. The catalogue holds 37 titles dated 1972 to 2026, from The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems to Goldfinches, taking in American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990) and A Poetry Handbook (1994). The volumes are short, around 80 pages at the median, and essay collections sit beside the poetry.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Robert Frost

32 books• 4 series

Robert Frost (1874–1963) was an American poet known for realistic pictures of rural New England life and for a command of American colloquial speech, both used to open out social and philosophical questions. Frost is the only poet to have received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1958, took the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 and was named poet laureate of Vermont in 1961. Thirty books are catalogued, from A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) through Mountain Interval and The Road Not Taken (1916) to New Hampshire (1923) and the collected editions.

Walt Whitman

60 books• 3 series

Walt Whitman (Walter Whitman Jr., May 31, 1819 to March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist who also wrote two novels. Whitman drew on both transcendentalism and realism and is often called the father of free verse. Leaves of Grass (1855) drew charges of obscenity from some readers for its open sensuality. Born in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and left school at 11 to work. The catalogue lists 60 books, including Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate (1842), Drum Taps (1865) and Oh Captain! My Captain! (1865).

Maya Angelou

51 books• 3 series

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014), born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was an American memoirist, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several books of poetry. The first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), covers Angelou's life up to age 17. Other catalogued titles include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). The catalogue counts 51 books, including And Still I Rise (1978), and ends with Strategies of Abundance (2014). Angelou received more than 50 honorary degrees.

May Sarton was the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (1912-1995), a Belgian and American novelist, poet and memoirist. Sarton came out as a lesbian in the writing in 1965, at a time when that was rare. Poetry opens the catalogue with Encounter in April (1937) and Inner Landscape (1939); novels follow from The Bridge of Years (1946), and diaries make up a third strand. 54 titles are catalogued through 2024, averaging 214 pages, with the 1990s the busiest decade.

Margaret Atwood

89 books• 8 series

Margaret Atwood, born November 18, 1939, is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic and inventor. The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel from 1985, is the best-known Atwood work. Atwood's output includes 18 poetry books, 18 novels, 11 non-fiction books, nine short fiction collections, eight children's books and two graphic novels. The catalogue opens with The Circle Game (1964) and runs to Book of Lives (2025), with The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972) along the way. Series include MaddAddam, Handmaid's Tale and Angel Catbird. Awards include two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Order of Canada.

Alice Walker

50 books• 1 series

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, short story writer and social activist. Walker's 50 catalogued books run from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021). The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first African-American woman to take that award, and it heads a Color Purple sequence. Poetry such as Revolutionary Petunias (1973) and essays such as In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1983) sit beside the novels. African American women authors, biography and poetry recur as subject headings. No new title has appeared since 2021.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 - November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, among them The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947), both with illustrations by Clement Hurd. Brown has been called the laureate of the nursery. Brown also published as Golden MacDonald for Doubleday, as Timothy Hay for Harper & Brothers, and, with Edith Thacher Hurd, as Juniper Sage for William R. Scott. The catalogue lists 166 books, opening with When the Wind Blew (1937), then I Like Bugs and The Steam Roller (1938). Stories in rhyme, rabbits, bedtime and sound recur in the subjects.

Jimmy Santiago Baca, born 2 January 1952, is an American poet, memoirist and screenwriter from New Mexico. Prisons, Mexican American life and the land run through the poetry, from Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (1987) and Black Mesa Poems (1989) to Immigrants in Our Own Land. A Place to Stand (2001) turns to memoir, and later work covers special education and children with disabilities. 28 titles span 1977 to The Misfits in 2022, at a median of 143 pages.

Jack Kerouac

47 books

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet, and a pioneer of the Beat Generation alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The catalogue carries 47 books dated 1942 to 2018, a span that runs long past Kerouac's death in 1969 through posthumous publication. The Sea Is My Brother (1942) and And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945) sit at one end, On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) in the middle, and Piers of the Homeless Night (2018) at the other. Poetry, letters and biography fill out the list beside the fiction.

T.S. Eliot

86 books• 2 series

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot, 26 September 1888 to 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright and a leading figure of modernist poetry in English. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Boston Brahmin family, Eliot moved to England in 1914 at 25 and settled, worked and married there. Eliot received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. The catalogue lists 86 books, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) through The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) to Volume 9 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot (2021).

Kevin Crossley-Holland

75 books• 4 series

Kevin Crossley-Holland, born 7 February 1941, is an English poet, translator and author for children. The Arthur trilogy (2000–2003) won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Storm, a 1985 novella, received the Carnegie Medal and in 2007, the medal's 70th anniversary, was named among the ten top winners. The catalogue lists 75 books from Havelok The Dane (1964) to Red the River Rises (2026), with King Horn: A Medieval Romance (1966), The Green Children (1968) and The Rain-Giver: Poems (1972) among them. Folklore, tales, poetry and the Middle Ages appear in the subjects.

Ezra Pound

59 books• 1 series

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was an American poet and critic and a central figure of early modernism. A Lume Spento (1908) opens the catalogue, followed by Personae (1909), The Spirit of Romance (1910) and Ripostes (1912), while the long poem The Cantos occupied Pound from about 1915 to 1962. Pound developed Imagism, a movement built on precision and economy of language, and as a London-based foreign editor for American literary magazines he shaped work by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and H.D. Pound collaborated with Fascist Italy and the Salo Republic during the Second World War. The catalogue lists 59 titles, the Ezra Pound Letters volumes among them.

Stephen Dobyns (February 19, 1941 to June 14, 2026) was an American poet and novelist. The catalogue lists 40 books from Concurring Beasts (1972) to Saratoga Payback (2017). Poetry and American poetry appear among the subjects, as do private investigators, missing persons and Saratoga Springs, New York. Charlie Bradshaw is the series listed and a fictitious character named in the subjects. Titles include A Man Of Little Evils (1973), Saratoga Longshot (1976), Heat Death (1980), The Balthus Poems (1982) and Cold Dog Soup (1985).

Rita Dove

15 books

Rita Dove, born 28 August 1952, is an American poet and essayist. In 1987 Dove became the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Dove served as poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995, the first African American in that post, and as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Dove has taught at the University of Virginia since 1989. The catalogue holds 15 books from The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) to Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), including Thomas and Beulah (1986).

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

John Updike

83 books• 8 series

John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic of art and literature who died on January 27, 2009. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only four writers to do so, and the output spans over twenty novels and more than twelve short-story collections, plus poetry, children's books and criticism of art and literature. The New Yorker printed hundreds of Updike stories, reviews and poems from 1954 on, and Updike wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. The catalogue lists 83 books from The Poorhouse Fair (1958) to Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020), including Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Series include Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Maples Stories and Eastwick.

Sherman Alexie

26 books

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter and filmmaker whose work draws on his life as an Indigenous American with ancestry in several tribes. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and lives in Seattle, Washington. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is his best known book: it took the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007, and the Odyssey Award for best audiobook for young people in 2008, read by Alexie himself. Twenty-six titles are catalogued, from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) to You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (2017).

Daisy Goodwin

21 books• 6 series

Daisy Georgia Goodwin, born 19 December 1961, is an English screenwriter, TV producer and novelist who created Victoria for ITV and PBS, a show sold to 146 countries. Goodwin's four novels, My Last Duchess / The American Heiress, The Fortune Hunter, Victoria and Diva, were New York Times bestsellers translated into more than ten languages. Goodwin has also curated eight poetry anthologies. The catalogue opens with The Nation's Favourite Love Poems (1997) and 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life (1999), and Diva (2024) is the newest.

Giles Andreae is a British writer and illustrator, born 16 March 1966. Andreae created the stickman poet Purple Ronnie and the artist-philosopher Edward Monkton, and wrote Giraffes Can't Dance. The children's series under his name take in Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs, Billy Bonkers, Sir Scallywag, Nat Fantastic and the Pants books, most of them picture books in rhyme at a median of 32 pages. The listing holds 86 titles dated 2000 to 2021.

Robert Penn Warren

69 books• 3 series

Robert Penn Warren is the only writer to have received Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry: the 1947 novel prize for All the King's Men (1946), and the poetry prize in 1958 and again in 1979. Born on April 24, 1905, and dying on September 15, 1989, Warren worked as a poet, novelist, critic and Yale professor. Warren was a founding figure of New Criticism and a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and co-founded The Southern Review in 1935 alongside Cleanth Brooks. Yale gave Warren an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1973. Catalogued books number 69, among them John Brown (1929), Understanding Poetry (1938), Night Rider (1939) and At Heaven's Gate (1943).