The words of Emma Lazarus’s famous 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” have seemed more visible since Donald Trump’s election. They can be found on the news and on posters, in tweets and in the streets.

Guest columnist Beth Ann Fennelly analyzes Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 for its enduring relevance. The sonnet describes a speaker's journey from self-pity and envy to finding joy through love. Shakespeare ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Sughnen Yongo is a Midwest writer covering Black women, pop culture. In more ways than I can count, Shakespeare isn’t just a ...

This most famous of the one hundred fifty-four sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) evokes, as we all know, both the sweet sadness of the year’s waning and the less-sweet sadness of our own ...

Oliver de la Paz’s poem is part of a series of “diaspora sonnets,” in which this one, along with others, create a whole, while each sonnet can still operate on its own. These sonnets don’t have all ...

Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you As yet but knock breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The great love poet is here locked in an anxious wrestle with his religious conscience Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit; that when I would ...

Wanda Coleman’s work has that ineffable quality that accompanies poetry you understand in your belly and your head. And so when she says, “my delicious dilemma is language,” it makes all the sense in ...

Love poems? Let's see how well you know them. Do you know the difference between a ballad and an elegy? Can you tell what a lyric is? Or can identity what a five line witty poem with a distinctive ...

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) figured significantly in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. Though prominent as a diarist, journalist, and activist for ...