The poets laureate anthology
(Book)

2010- and 1999-2000: W.S. Merwin

2008-2010: Kay Ryan

2007-2008: Charles Simic

2006-2007: Donald Hall

2004-2006: Ted Kooser

2003-2004: Louise Glück

2001-2003: Billy Collins

2000-2001 and 1974-1976: Stanley Kunitz

1997-2000: Robert Pinsky

1995-1997: Robert Hass

1993-1995: Rita Dove

1992-1993: Mona Van Duyn

1991-1992: Joseph Brodsky

1990-1991: Mark Strand

1988-1990 and 1963-1964: Howard Nemerov

1987-1988: Richard Wilbur

1986-1987 and 1944-1945: Robert Penn Warren

1985-1986: Gwendolyn Brooks

1984-1985: Robert Fitzgerald

1982-1984: Anthony Hecht

1981-1982: Maxine Kumin

1978-1980: William Meredith

1976-1978: Robert Hayden

1973-1974: Daniel Hoffman

1971-1973: Josephine Jacobsen

1970-1971: William Stafford

1968-1970: William Jay Smith

1966-1968: James Dickey

1965-1966: Stephen Spender

1964-1965 and 1984-1985: Reed Whittemore

1961-1963: Louis Untermeyer

1959-1961: Richard Eberhart

1958-1959: Robert Frost

1956-1958: Randall Jarrell

1952: William Carlos Williams

1950-1952: Conrad Aiken

1949-1950: Elizabeth Bishop

1948-1949: Léonie Adams

1947-1948: Robert Lowell

1946-1947: Karl Shapiro

1945-1946: Louise Bogan

1943-1944: Allen Tate

1937-1941: Joseph Auslander.

Poems: [signature poems in brackets] -- 2010- And 1999-2000: W. S. Merwin: [To the Words] ; Separation ; The Way to the River ; When You Go Away ; The Asians Dying ; For a Coming Extinction ; Fox Sleep ; Before the Flood ; Good People ; To the Consolations of Philosophy ; Good Night ; Rain Light ; Alba ; Forgotten Fountain -- 2008-2010: Kay Ryan: [Things Shouldn't Be So Hard] ; This Life ; Flamingo Watching ; Force ; Paired Things ; Doubt ; Mirage Oases ; That Vase of Lilacs ; Turtle ; Relief ; A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water ; A Hundred Bolts of Satin ; Crown ; Home to Roost ; Sharks' Teeth ; Hide and Seek ; Odd Blocks -- 2007-2008: Charles Simic: [My Weariness of Epic Proportions] ; ("My mother was a braid of black smoke") ; ("I was stolen by the gypsies") ; ("My father loved the strange books of Andre Breton") ; Evening Talk ; In the Library ; Cameo Appearance ; An Address with Exclamation Points ; Entertaining the Canary ; Against Winter ; Empire of Dreams ; My Beloved ; Prodigy ; The Return of the Invisible Man ; Love Poem ; Couple at Coney Island ; Listen -- 2006-2007: Donald Hall: [White Apples] ; Gold ; To a Waterfowl ; Maple Syrup ; Names of Horses ; The Ship Pounding ; Her Garden ; Ardor ; Kill the Day ; Affirmation ; Safe Sex ; Nymph and Shepherd ; After Love -- 2004-2006: Ted Kooser: [So This Is Nebraska] ; Selecting a Reader ; Carrie ; My Grandfather Dying ; Highway 30 ; Flying at Night ; The Fan in the Window ; december 15 ; february 10 ; february 21 ; Tattoo ; At the Cancer Clinic ; A Jar of Buttons ; Grasshoppers -- 2003-2004: Louise Gluck: [Mock Orange] ; The Drowned Children ; A Novel ; Celestial Music ; First Memory ; Penelope's Song ; Telemachus' Detachment ; Telemachus' Guilt ; Telemachus' Fantasy ; Nest ; Eros ; Time ; Memoir ; October ; At the River -- 2001-2003: Billy Collins: [Litany] ; Advice to Writers ; Introduction to Poetry ; Pinup ; Man in Space ; A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal ; Picnic, Lightning ; Forgetfulness ; Sonnet ; Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House ; The Names ; The Breather ; Searching ; Pornography -- 2000-2001 And 1974-1976: Stanley Kunitz: [Halley's Comet] ; I Dreamed That I Was Old ; The Waltzer in the House ; The War Against the Trees ; An Old Cracked Tune ; The Portrait ; King of the River ; The Knot ; Passing Through ; My Mother's Pears ; Touch Me ; Promise Me ; The System ; Three Floors ; The Wellfleet Whale --

1997-2000: Robert Pinsky: [Samurai Song] ; Doctor Frolic ; Ralegh's Prizes ; Shirt ; ABC ; To Television ; Jersey Rain ; Poem of Disconnected Parts ; The Forgetting ; Stupid Meditation on Peace ; XYZ ; First Things to Hand -- Last Robot Song -- 1995-1997: Robert Hass: [Meditation at Lagunitas] ; Measure ; Winter Morning in Charlottesville ; Child Naming Flowers ; Museum ; Misery and Splendor ; Happiness ; Dragonflies Mating ; Sonnet ; A Supple Wreath of Myrtle ; Futures in Lilacs ; Etymology ; Time and Materials ; Then Time ; Bush's War -- 1993-1995: Rita Dove: [This Life] ; Dusting ; Weathering Out ; Daystar ; "Teach Us to Number Our Days" ; The House Slave ; My Mother Enters the Work Force ; Canary ; Persephone, Falling ; Golden Oldie ; Wiring Home ; Ta Ta Cha Cha ; The Bridgetower ; Ach, Wien -- 1992-1993: Mona Van Duyn: [Death by Aesthetics] ; The Gentle Snorer ; Sonnet for Minimalists ; Late Loving ; For William Clinton, President-Elect ; The Burning of Yellowstone ; Falling in Love at Sixty-Five ; Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri ; The Block ; A Kind of Music ; Notes from a Suburban Heart ; Evening Stroll in the Suburbs -- 1991-1992: Joseph Brodsky: [To The President-Elect] ; Six Years Later ; Anno Domini ; Autumn in Norenskaia ; "A second Christmas by the shore" ; from A Part of Speech ("I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland") ; Tornfallet ; Love Song ; Folk Tune ; Bosnia Tune ; Once More by the Potomac -- 1990-1991: Mark Strand: [Keeping Things Whole] ; Eating Poetry ; The Remains ; Coming to This ; The Coming of Light ; Lines for Winter ; For Jessica, My Daughter ; Pot Roast ; The Continuous Life ; A Piece of the Storm ; The Night, the Porch ; Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life ; The View ; Black Sea ; My Name ; Mirror -- 1988-1990 And 1963-1964: Howard Nemerov: [Money] ; Storm Windows ; The Blue Swallows ; The Vacuum ; To D-, Death by Her Own Hand ; I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee ; The Goose Fish ; Style ; Boy with Book of Knowledge ; On an Occasion of National Mourning ; To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century ; The Makers ; On Being Asked for a Peace Poem ; Elegy for a Nature Poet --

1987-1988: Richard Wilbur: [Blackberries for Amelia] ; The Sirens ; Clearness ; A Simile for Her Smile ; A Grasshopper ; Someone Talking to Himself ; Love Calls Us to the Things of This World ; Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning ; The Beacon ; Boy at the Window ; All These Birds ; A Pasture Poem ; A Measuring Worm ; Terza Rima -- 1986-1987 And 1944-1945: Robert Penn Warren: [Patriotic Tour and Postulate of Joy] ; Bearded Oaks ; Revelation ; Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A. ; Modification of Landscape ; Ways of Day ; The World Is a Parable ; Evening Hawk ; Unless ; Mortal Limit ; Rumor at Twilight ; Little Girl Wakes Early ; The Loose Shutter -- 1985-1986: Gwendolyn Brooks: [We Real Cool] ; kitchenette building ; a song in the front yard ; Sadie and Maud ; The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till ; The Ballad of Rudolph Reed ; when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story ; Boy Breaking Glass ; The Second Sermon on the Warpland ; The Crazy Woman ; A Lovely Love ; Of Robert Frost ; Langston Hughes ; Medgar Evers -- 1984-1985: Robert Fitzgerald: [July in Indiana] ; Song After Campion ; Song for September ; Horae ; Cobb Would Have Caught It ; Lightness in Autumn ; Aerial ; Metamorphosis ; Patrum Propositum ; Borges's Love's Priority -- 1982-1984: Anthony Hecht: [A Hill] ; A Letter ; "The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee" ; "It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It" ; "More Light! More Light!" ; An Overview ; Curriculum Vitae ; The Book of Yolek ; Death the Painter ; A Certain Slant -- 1981-1982: Maxine Kumin: [Credo] ; Poem for my Son ; Spree ; A Calling ; Hay ; Fat Pets On ; Noah, at Six Months ; Deja Vu ; Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief ; Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth ; Fox on His Back ; Seven Caveats in May ; Looking Back in My Eighty-first Year ; The Revisionist Dream -- 1978-1980: William Meredith: [A Mild-Spoken Citizen Finally Writes to the White House] ; Airman's Virture ; Envoi ; The Illiterate ; A Major Work ; An Assent to Wildflowers ; The Wreck of the Thesher ; Winter Verse for His Sister ; Accidents of Birth ; Poem About Morning ; In Memory of Robert Frost ; For Two Lovers in the Year 2075 in the Canadian Woods ; What I Remember the Writers Telling Me When I Was Young -- 1976-1978: Robert Hayden: [Those Winter Sundays] ; The Diver ; Homage to the Empress of the Blues ; The Whipping ; Middle Pasage ; Frederick Douglass ; "'Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville" ; Words in the Mourning ; A Plague of Starlings ; A Letter from Phillis Wheatley ; Names ; The Islands ; Bone-Flower Elegy --

1973-1974: Daniel Hoffman: [The seals in Penobscot Bay] ; In the Days of Rin-Tin-Tin ; Power ; from Brotherly Love, 34 ("Silence, more") ; from Brotherly Love, 61 ("... On City Hall, above our lights") ; Reasons ; from Middens of the Tribe, 42 ("Father dead and buried, the old house sold-") ; Violence ; Owed to Dejection -- 1971-1973: Josephine Jacobsen: [First Woman] ; Lines to a Poet ; Landscape Finally with Human Figure ; Gentle Reader ; How We Learn ; Language as an Escape from the Discrete ; The Arrivals ; The Monosyllable ; Over Timberline ; The Dogs ; The Blue-Eyed Exterminator ; Hourglass ; The Edge -- 1970-1971: William Stafford: {Objector] ; An Introduction to Some Poems ; Ask Me ; Level Light ; A Ritual to Read to Each Other ; Traveling Through the Dark ; The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune ; When I Met My Muse ; Security ; For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid ; Just Thinking -- 1968-1970: William Jay Smith: [The Pumpkin Field] ; Now Touch the Air Softly ; Persian Minature ; A Room in the Villa ; Morels ; Winter Morning ; The World below the Window ; American Primitive ; The Atoll ; Invitation to Ground Zero -- 1966-1968: James Dickey: [In the Child's Night] ; The Sheep Child ; Adultery ; The Heaven of Animals ; In the Tree House at Night ; The Hospital Window ; Cherrylog Road ; Drinking from a Helmet -- 1965-1966: Stephen Spender: [What I Expected] ; I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great ; Not Palaces ; Awaking ; Word ; Empty House ; An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum ; One More New Botched Beginning -- 1964-1965 And 1984-1985: Reed Whittemore: [Clamming] ; Preface to an Unwritten Text ; Spring, etc. ; The Radio Under the Bed ; The Cultural Conference ; The Philadelphia Vireo ; What Was It Like? ; Let It Blow -- 1961-1963: Louis Untermeyer: [Infidelity] ; Jerusalem Delivered ; Scarcely Spring ; Six Epigrams ; Summer Storm ; Upon Washington Bridge ; Words for a Jig -- 1959-1961: Richard Eberhart: [21st Century Man] ; The Groundhog ; The Fury of Aerial Bombardment ; The Hard Structure of the World ; The Swallows Return ; As If You Had Never Been ; Gnat on My Paper ; Man's Type ; Long Term Suffering ; You Think They Are Permanent but They Pass ; Coast of Maine --

1958-1959: Robert Frost: [The Gift Outright] ; The Pasture ; Mending Wall ; The Road Not Taken ; The Oven Bird ; Birches ; Fire and Ice ; Dust of Snow ; Nothing Gold Can Stay ; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ; Design ; The Silken Tent ; Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same -- 1956-1958: Randall Jarrell: [1945: The Death of the Gods] ; A Girl in a Library ; Children Selecting Books in a Library ; The Snow-Leopard ; Eighth Air Force ; A Pilot from the Carrier ; The Sick Nought ; The Truth ; Well Water ; The Refugees ; The Woman at the Washington Zoo -- 1952: William Carlos Williams: [Danse Russe] ; The Red Wheelbarrow ; It Is a Living Coral ; Poem ; This Is Just to Say ; Item ; The Locust Tree in Flower ; The Term ; The Last Words of My English Grandmother ; The Dance ; A Sort of a Song ; The Maneuver ; The Mind Hesitant ; The Sparrow -- 1950-1952: Conrad Aiken: [The Habeas Corpus Blues] ; Exile ; from Time in the Rock, IV ("Woman, woman, let us say these things to each other") ; from Time in the Rock, XLVII ("Not with the noting of a private hate") ; from Time in the Rock, LXXVII ("The great one who collects the sea shells I beheld") ; The Whippoorwill ; Music ; Summer ; When You Are Not Suprised ; The Grasshopper -- 1949-1950: Elizabeth Bishop: [Sandpiper] ; The Imaginary Iceberg ; Casabianca ; The Unbeliever ; The Fish ; At the Fishhouses ; View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress ; Letter to N.Y. ; The Shampoo ; Song for the Rainy Season ; Manners ; In the Waiting Room ; Sestina ; One Art ; Five Flights Up ; "It is marvellous to wake up together" ; "Dear, my compass" -- 1948-1949: Leonie Adams: [Magnificat in Little] ; Recollection of the Wood ; The Summer Image ; Sundown ; Early Waking ; Song from a Country Fair ; The Mount ; Thought's End -- 1947-1948: Robert Lowell: [Man and Wife] ; The Exile's Return ; Inauguration Day: January 1953 ; Father's Bedroom ; Skunk Hour ; Water ; For the Union Dead ; The Old Flame ; Fall 1961 ; July in Washington ; New York 1962: Fragment ; Night Sweat ; Randall Jarrell 2 ; The Nihilist as Hero ; Symptoms --

1946-1947: Karl Shapiro: [Lower the Standard] ; The Fly ; Poet ; Elegy for a Dead Soldier ; The Living Rooms of My Neighbors ; Editing Poetry ; Manhole Covers ; A Drawerful of Eyeglasses ; Man on Wheels ; The Piano Tuner's Wife

1945-1946: Louise Bogan: [The Daemon] ; Medusa ; Knowledge ; Second Song ; Several Voices Out of A Cloud ; Question in a Field ; Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell ; The Dream ; Cartography ; The Dragon Fly ; Night

1943-1944: Allen Tate: [Ode to the Confederate Dead] ; Mr. Pope ; The Wolves ; The Mediterranean ; Aeneas at Washington ; The Meaning of Life ; To the Lacedemonians ; The Swimmers ; Ode to Our Young Pro-counsuls of the Air ; Winter Mask

1937-1941: Joseph Auslander: [Protest] ; Dawn at the Rain's Edge ; Home-Bound ; Upper Park Avenue ; Severus to Tiberius Greatly Ennuye ; Testament ; Target for Tonight.