For some reason poetry has come to symbolize something uniquely feminine. This is strange since a vast amount of poetry has been written by men, manly men, much of it centered on epic war themes. Perhaps some boys hear too many sonnets and love songs before they find out the masculine heart of poetry. Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson are not the places to start with boys. It is not hard at all, even amongst the most well-known poetry, to find poems that boys will love.
One of my sons was particularly fond of Poe, which surprised me. Most women are not fond of Poe. But Poe is the perfect masculine poet. His poems are easily read, tell a story, mysterious, lyrical and full of the themes boys respond to. Poe gives a boy a chance to feel brave or to face his own fears.
Kipling is another manly poet. Of course, Kipling is out of fashion for his imperialistic views but the man was a genius at writing masculine poetry. Here is one of my favorites. Read it through a few times because the English cockney accent is hard to grab but well worth the effort.
Some other easy to find poems that boys love:
Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson
Requiem
UNDER the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The Village Blacksmith by Longfellow
Henry V’s Speech to his cousin Westmorland William Shakespeare ( It doesn’t get any better than this.)
The Destruction of Sennacherib Byron
The Charge of the Light Brigade Tennyson
Paul Revere’s Ride Longfellow
Sail on Joaquin Miller
Casey at the Bat by Thayer ( and several sequels by various authors)
The Illiad & The Odyssey by Homer
James Whitcomb Riley has many poems about a boy’s life.
You can never, never go wrong with the Scottish bards: Burns & Scott. If you have any celtic blood in you at all, you owe it to your sons to introduce them to the Scottish warrior poets.
Windy Nights by RLS
Robert Frost is a particularly manly poet.
Sir John Suckling’s Why So Pale and Wan? is the kind of love poem boys will like.
There is a whole vast body of poems on sinking ships and life at sea.
These are only the most obvious choices.
Don’t sit your boys down and expect them to like poems about the stars being God’s daisy chain.
‘”Every time a fairy sheds a tear, a wee star is born in the Milky Way.” Have you ever thought that, Mr Wooster?’
I never had. Most improbable, I considered, and it didn’t seem to me to check up with her statement that the stars were God’s daisy chain. I mean, you can’t have it both ways.
– Right Ho, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
Blood and violence are far better things than fairy tears for the little men among us.
( There is wry humor in that last sentence but you would have to know my dad to get it.)