For the best books list of poetry, I broke the list into poets, books of poetry, and anthologies. It’s hard to separate one from another, but I didn’t want to just grab best books of poetry when a beloved poet might not get included. I also didn’t want to skip over all the great poetry anthologies, which is where I have read most of my most beloved poetry and poets. So here it is.

POETRY BOOKS:

• Lighthead, Terrence Hayes
• Praise, Robert Hass
• The Book of Nigthmares, Galway Kinnell
• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
• Ariel, Sylvia Plath
• The Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
• Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg
• Mother Love, Rita Dove
• Mountain Interval, RObert Frost
• Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein
• Sinners Welcome, Mary Karr
• The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
• Leave of Grass, Walt Whitman
• Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
• Antidote, Corey Van Landingham
• Dance Dance Revolution, Cathy Park Hong
• The Dream Songs, John Berryman
• No Planets Strike, Josh Bell
• Metamorphoses, Ovid
• My Life, Lyn Hejinian
• The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
• The Morning of the Poem, James Schuyler
• The Wasteland and Other Poems, T.S. Eliot
• Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
• Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry
• The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck
• alphabet, Inger Christensen
• View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska
• Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey
• 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings
• The Master Letters, Lucie Brock-Broido
• Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith
• The Essential Rumi, Rumi
• Ooga-Booga, Frederick Seidel
• Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney
• Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks
• American Primitive, Mary Oliver
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes
• Spring and All, William Carlos Williams
• The Complete Poems, John Keats
• Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds
• Coal, Audre Lorde
• Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke
• Collected Poems, Wallace Stephens
• New and Selected Poems, Charles Simic
• What the Living Do, Marie Howe
• Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney
• Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
• Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, Maya Angelou
• The Complete English Poems, John Donne
• The Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po
• Paradise Lost, John Milton
• Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Don Juan, Lord Byron
• Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
• The Man with Night Sweats, Thom Gunn
• The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
• Howl, Kaddash, and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg
• Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes
• Dart, Alice Oswald
• Family Values, Wendy Cope
• The Divine Comedy, Dante
• Songs and Sonnets, John Donne
• Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Les Fleurs de Mal, Charles Beaudelaire
• Selected Poems, John Clare
• Montage of a Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes
• Station Island, Seamus Heaney
• The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
• Selected Poetry, Yehuda Amichai
• White Egrets, Derek Wallcot
• The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
• Migration, W.S. Merwin
• The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, Maya Angelou
• Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara
• The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, Deborah Digges
• A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell
• The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost
• The Best of It, Kay Ryan
• Dream Work, Mary Oliver
• The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks
• Selected Poems, WIlliam Carlos Williams
• Lyrical Ballads, Anonymous
• Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, John Keats
• Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, Alfred Lord Tennyson
• North of Boston, Robert Frost
• Poems, Edward Thomas
• Poems, W.H. Auden
• The Less Deceived, Philip Larkin
• North, Seamus Heaney
• The Psalms, the Bible
• Collected Poems, T.S. Eliot
• Poems from the Book of Hours, R.M. Rilke
• Poems by George Seferis, George Seferis
• Collected Poems, Edward Thomas
• Collected Poems, W.H. Auden
• Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas
• Collected Poems, Bernard Spencer
• Life Studies, Robert Lowell
• Collected Poems, Philip Larkin

This list of poets is taken directly from Poetry Soup, because I thought it was pretty good. POETS:

• Maya Angelou
• Emily Dickenson
• Shel Silverstein
• Ben Jonson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Lascelles Abercrombie
• Robert Frost
• Sarah Fuller Flower Adams
• William Shakespeare
• Pablo Neruda
• E E Cummings
• Delmira Augustini
• Langston Hughes
• Jane Austen
• Walt Whitman
• Anna Akhmatova
• Robert Burns
• Julie Hill Alger
• Thomas Hardy
• Rudyard Kipling
• Oscar Wilde
• John Keats
• Elizabeth Barrett Bronwing
• Billy Collins
• William Blake
• Sylvia Plath
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Gary Soto
• William Wordsworth
• Carol Ann Duffy
• Phyllis Wheatley
• Sandra Cisneros
• Rabidranath Tagore
• Matthew Arnold
• Mark Twain
• Louisa May Alcott
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Sara Teasedale
• Conrad Aiken
• John Donne
• William Butler Yeates
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• Lord George Byron
• Homer
• Lewis Carroll
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Dante Alighieri
• Alice Walker
• W.H. Auden
• Sappho

POETRY ANTHOLOGIES, including childrens’:

• Poetry by Heart, Scholastic
• Around the World in Eighty Poems, Chronicle
• Big, Bad and a Little Bit Scary, Viking
• Poems by Adolescents and Adults, NCTE
• Word of Mouth, Vintage Books
• Poetry for Extraordinary Times, Random House
• A Jar of Tiny Stars, Boyds Mill Press and NCTE
• Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, University of Iowa Press
• Unsettling America, Penguin Books
• Spirit and Flame, Syracuse University Press
• The Poetry of Arab Women, Interlink Publishing Group
• My Song Is Beautiful, Little, Brown and Co.
• The Kingfisher Book of Family Poems, Kingfisher
• Through Our Eyes, Little, Brown and Company
• Lives, HarperCollins Publishers
• Teaching With Fire, Jossey-Bass
• Good Poems, Viking Press
• A Family of Poems, Caroline Kennedy
• Talking to the Sun, Henry Holt and Company
• On City Streets, Bantam Books
• Countdown to Summer, Little, Brown and Co.
• Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, Beacon Press
• This Same Sky, Four Winds Press
• Imagination’s Other Place, Thomas Y. Cromwell Company
• The Invisible Ladder, Henry Holt and Co.
• Truth and Lies, Henry Holt and Company
• …I never saw another butterfly…, Schocken Books
• Sky Scrape/City Scrape, Boyds Mills Press
• Mother Earth, Father Sky, Boyds Mill Press
• The Poetry of Birds, Penguin Books Ltd.
• The Best American Poetry (series), Scribner
• Poems on the Underground
• Scanning the Century, Penguin
• The Rattle Bag, Faber & Faber
• Wild Reckoning, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
• Vanishing Points, Salt Publishing
• The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Norton and Co.
• The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, Oxford University Press
• Trees Be Company
• A World of Poetry, Royal Fireworks Press
• Being Alive and Staying Alive, Bloodaxe Books
• Earth Songs, Scholastic
• Bestiary
• Luckenbooth, Birlinn Ltd
• The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, Barefoot Books
• I’ve Got a Poem for You, Oxford University Press
• The Oxford Treasury of Classic Poems, Oxford University Press
• The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury, Knopf Books for Young Readers
• The Invisible Ladder, Henry Holt and Co.
• Sing a Song of Popcorn, Scholastic Press
• A Child’s Anthology of Poetry, Deckle Edge/Ekko
• Bum Rush the Page, Ramdom House
• A Book of Luminous Things, Harcourt
• Americans’ Favorite Poems, Norton & Co
• City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, City Lights Books
• Writing To Be Seen, Light & Dust Books
• Poems for the Millennium, University of California Press
• Committed to Memory, Turtle Point Press
• Poetry Slam, Manic D Press

 For best POEMS, you could read one of the recommend general anthologies or see Best Poems Encyclopedia for best 100 lists by genre, etc.