List of poets from the United States

This is a list of poets from the United States, or American poets, that have written important poetry or famous poetry.

Poets that are alive, are at the bottom of the list.

• Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784)

• Jupiter Hammon (d. c. 1806)

• Francis Scott Key (d.1843), a poem of his became the national anthem of the United States

• Edgar Allan Poe (d. 1849)
• John Pierpont (d. 1866)

• Nathaniel Parker Willis (d. 1867)

• Phoebe Cary (d. 1871)

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882)

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (d. 1882)

• Emily Dickinson (d. 1886)

• Emma Lazarus (d.1887)

• William Clark Falkner (d. 1889)

• Herman Melville (d. 1890)
• James Russell Lowell (d. 1891)

• Walt Whitman (d. 1892)
• John Greenleaf Whittier (d. 1892)

• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (d. 1894)

• Stephen Crane (d. 1900)

• Julia Ward Howe (d. 1910)

• Richard Howard (d. 1922)

• Elinor Wylie (d. 1928)

• Hart Crane (d. 1932)

• Sara Teasdale (d. 1933)

• James Weldon Johnson (d. 1938)

• Gertrude Stein (d. 1946)

• Edna St. Vincent Millay (d. 1950)

• Julia de Burgos (d. 1953)

• Wallace Stevens (d. 1955)

• Richard Wright (d. 1960)

• Jessie Redmon Fauset (d. 1961)

• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (d. 1961)

• E. E. Cummings (d. 1962)

• Robinson Jeffers (d. 1962)

• Robert Frost (d. 1963)

• Sylvia Plath (d. 1963)

• Theodore Roethke (d. 1963)

• William Carlos Williams (d. 1963)

• T. S. Eliot (d. 1965); The Waste Land is [one of] his most important poems.

• Jack Spicer (d. 1965)

• Frank O'Hara (d. 1966)

• Langston Hughes (d. 1967)

• Dorothy Parker (d. 1967)

• Carl Sandburg (d. 1967)

• Mercedes de Acosta (d. 1968)

• Thomas Merton (d. 1968)
• Lorine Niedecker (d. 1970)
• Charles Olson (d. 1970)

• Jim Morrison (d. 1971)

• Ogden Nash (d. 1971)

• John Berryman (d. 1972)

• Marianne Moore (d. 1972)

• Ezra Pound (d. 1972)

• John Crowe Ransom (d. 1974)

• Anne Sexton (d. 1974)

• Charles Reznikoff (d. 1976)

• Robert Lowell (d. 1977)
• Louis Zukofsky (d. 1978)

• Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979)

• Allen Tate (d. 1979)

• Muriel Rukeyser (d. 1980)

• Richard Hugo (d. 1982)

• Archibald MacLeish (d. 1982)

• Kenneth Rexroth (d. 1982)

• Ted Berrigan (d. 1983)

• Raymond Roseliep (d. 1983)

• George Oppen (d. 1984)

• Raymond Carver (d. 1988)

• Robert Penn Warren (d. 1989)

• Etheridge Knight (d. 1991)

• James Schuyler (d. 1991)

• Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) (d. 1991)

• Audre Lorde (d. 1992)

• Charles Bukowski (d. 1994)

• James Merrill (d. 1995)

• Joseph Brodsky (d. 1996)

• James Dickey (d. 1997)

• Allen Ginsberg (d. 1997)

• Denise Levertov (d. 1997)

• Shel Silverstein (d. 1999)

• Besmilr Brigham (d. 2000)

• Gwendolyn Brooks (d. 2000)

• Beah Richards (d. 2000)

• Karl Shapiro (d. 2000)

• Jack Buck (d. 2002)

• Kenneth Koch (d. 2002)

• Philip Whalen (d. 2002)

• Cid Corman (d. 2004)

• Anthony Hecht (d. 2004)

• Donald Justice (d. 2004)

• Mona Van Duyn (d. 2004)
• Robert Creeley (d. 2005)

• Nipsey Russell (d. 2005)

• Barbara Guest (d. 2006)

• Stanley Kunitz (d. 2006)

• Diane Middlebrook (d. 2007)

• Hayden Carruth (d. 2008)

• John Updike (d. 2009)

• W. D. Snodgrass (d. 2009)

• Roberts Blossom (d. 2011)

• Galway Kinnell (d. 2014)

• Carolyn Kizer (d. 2014)

• Adrienne Rich (d. 2012)

• Lou Reed (d. 2013)

• Maya Angelou (d. 2014)

• Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) (d. 2014)

• Claudia Emerson (d. 2014)

• Mark Strand (d. 2014), Canadian-American

• Philip Levine (poet) (d. 2015)

• Rod McKuen (d. 2015)

• William Jay Smith (d. 2015)

• James Tate (writer) (d. 2015)

• C. K. Williams (d. 2015)

• Bill Berkson (d. 2016)

• John Ashbery (d. 2017)

• Kathryn Stripling Byer (d. 2017)

• Jim Harrison (d. 2017)

• Denis Johnson (d. 2017)

• Joanne Kyger (d. 2017)

• Harry Mathews (d. 2017)

• Richard Wilbur (d. 2017)

• Donald Hall (d. 2018)

• Ntozake Shange (d. 2018)

• David Berman (musician) (d. 2019)

• Steve Dalachinsky (d. 2019)

• W. S. Merwin (d. 2019)

• Mary Oliver (d. 2019)

• Kim Bridgford (d. 2020)
• Lewis MacAdams (d. 2020)

• Michael McClure (d. 2020)

• Lisel Mueller (d. 2020)

• Anne Stevenson (d. 2020), American-British

• Robert Bly (d. 2021)

• Stephen Dunn (d. 2021)

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti (d. 2021)

• Jack Hirschman (d. 2021)
• Bernadette Mayer (d. 2022)
• Gerald Stern (d. 2022)
• Louise Glück (d. 2023)
• Charles Simic (d. 2023)
• Amy Uyematsu (d. 2023), Japanese American

• Gary Snyder (born 1930)
• Wendell Berry (born 1934)
• Charles Wright (poet) (born 1935)
• Roald Hoffmann (born 1937)
• Frank Bidart (born 1939)
• Billy Collins (born 1941)
• Rolland Smith (born 1941)
• Ron Padgett (born 1942)
• Nikki Giovanni (born 1943)
• Rita Mae Brown (born 1944)
• Alice Walker (born 1944)

• Alice Notley (born 1945)
• Anne Waldman (born 1945)
• Patti Smith; Poetry collections from her, were published as early as 1972 and as late as 2005: Seventh Heaven and Auguries of Innocence; born 1946
• Rae Armantrout (born 1947)
• Alamgir Hashmi (born 1951)
• Rita Dove (born 1952)
• Giannina Braschi (born 1953)
• Ana Castillo (born 1953)
• Sandra Cisneros (born 1954)
• Viggo Mortensen (born 1958)
• Henry Rollins (born 1961)
• Claudia Rankine (born 1963)
• Natasha Trethewey (born 1966)
• Seth Abramson (born 1976)
• Carson Cistulli (born 1979)
• Amber Tamblyn (born 1983)
• Masiela Lusha (born 1985)
• Amanda Gorman (born 1998), first to become National Youth Poet Laureate

Related pages

• Bob Dylan (born 1941), winner of Nobel Prize
• List of poets from North America