Poems You Ought to Know

Elia Wilkinson Peattie compiled this anthology in 1902 with a quiet conviction: that modern life was draining something essential from people, and poetry might be the only thing that could restore it. Opening with Professor Charles Eliot Norton on poetry's "restorative powers," the collection gathers verses from Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Byron, and their peers, not as museum pieces, but as living voices for readers willing to step outside the noise. Peattie believed the busy modern reader had drifted from lyrical appreciation, and her selection aims to pull them back. The poems touch on universal themes: love, mortality, beauty, wonder. But beyond subject matter, what makes this anthology endure is its implicit argument, that poetry is not a luxury but a necessity, a daily practice of the inner life. For readers who sense they've lost something to the rush of existence, this collection still offers what it promised over a century ago: a door back into beauty.