collection
Father’s Day Poems
A fistful of poems about fatherhood by classic and contemporary poets.
Fathers Day is a rich holiday on the poetry calendar, and we present this selection for the dads as well as their kids. We’ve selected several poems about fatherhood, ranging from the classic (“Only a Dad” by Edgar Guest) to the contemporary (Maxine Kumin’s “Spree”). Some of these poems speak of fathers with love, admiration, and praise (“The Gift”), while others speak with resentment, sorrow, and regret (“In Dreams”). We've also got poems about children from the perspective of the father, from the first moment (“On the Birth of a Son”) on through the various stages of life (“Dressing my Daughters”).
In Praise of Fathers
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Anne Bradstreet
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Edgar Albert Guest
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Leslie Monsour
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Edgar Albert Guest
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Theodore Roethke
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Li-Young Lee
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Andrew Hudgins
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Bruce Weigl
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Larry Levis
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Quincy Troupe
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Michael Prior
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Eduardo C. Corral
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J. Patrick Lewis
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David Bottoms
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Gary Dop
In Praise of Fatherhood
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David Rivard
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William Carlos Williams
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Mark Jarman
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W. D. Snodgrass
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Walt Whitman
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Su Tung-Po
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Kenneth Rexroth
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Greg Delanty
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Craig Santos Perez
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Galway Kinnell
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Yehuda Amichai
Dads at Work
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Carl Dennis
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Andrew Hudgins
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Alan R. Shapiro
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Gjertrud Schnackenberg
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Bruce Smith
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Robert Hayden
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Maxine Kumin
Family History
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Michael S. Harper
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Diane Wakoski
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Seamus Heaney
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Bob Hicok
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Yusef Komunyakaa
In Memory
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Anne Sexton
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Linda Bierds
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Ben Jonson
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Sharon Olds
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James L. Dickey
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Ellen Bryant Voigt
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James Tate
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William Matthews
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W. S. Graham
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James Wright
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James L. Dickey
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Victoria Chang
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Martín Espada
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Kai Conradi
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Elise Partridge
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Frank Lima