The following is a list of the top 100 most famous poems of all time in the English

language. There's always some room for debate when making "top 100" list like this,
and let's face it, fame is a pretty fickle thing: it changes over time. But that said, we
did our best to use available objective data in putting together this ranked list of the
100 most widely recognized and enduring poems ever written. To create this list, the
following criteria was used: 1) Only poems that have "stood the test of time" were
considered for this list. Modern poetry of approximately the last century has therefore
not been included. 2) Each poem's ranking is based off of its relative fame within the
English language. 3) In order to create more even ground for comparison, we have
not included in this list nursery rhymes, or poems whose fame was primarily gained
from being set to music.