
Specpo down the Ages
Five Centuries of Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, and Exploratory Science Poetry in English
1500-1700
Anonymous
Margaret Cavendish
“Of Stars”
Christopher Marlowe
John Milton
William Shakespeare
“Queen Mab” from Romeo and Juliet
“The Weird Sisters’ Chant” from Macbeth
Edmund Spenser
1700-1800
Robert Burns
“Tam Lin” (reworking of a traditional ballad)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
William Wordsworth
1800-1850
George Gordon, Lord Byron
“Darkness”
Lewis Carroll
John Keats
Henry Thomas Liddell
Thomas Moore
“A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp”
Edgar Allan Poe
John Stagg
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1850-1900
William Allingham
Ambrose Bierce
Robert Bulwer-Lytton
Stephen Crane
Emily Dickinson
Rudyard Kipling
Edward Lear
Christina Rosetti
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
W. B. Yeats
“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea”
1900-1950
Stephen Vincent Benét
G. K. Chesterton
Robert Frost
Robert Graves
“The Railway Carriage (Welsh Incident)”
C. S. Lewis
H. P. Lovecraft
“The Wood”
Walter de la Mare
Don Marquis
“This Earth, It Is Also a Star”
“Haunted”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge”
Alfred Noyes
Wilfred Owen
“The Show”
J. R. R. Tolkien
“Far over the misty mountains cold”
1950-2000
Jaimes Alsop
Margaret Atwood
W. H. Auden
Richard Brautigan
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
Roald Dahl
Neil Gaiman
Robert Hayden
Denis Johnson
Edwin Morgan
“The Loch Ness Monster’s Song”
May Swenson
Jane Yolen
2000-2020
F. J. Bergmann
Kyle Dargan
Nitoo Das
Todd Dillard
“Rewind”
Margarita Engle
“The Headless Horseman of Cuba”
Michael R. Fosburg
“How Strange the Starship’s Shudder”
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Millie Ho
John Philip Johnson
Deborah P. Kolodji
Nicole J. LeBoeuf
Susan McLean
Mari Ness
“Snowmelt”
“Ice”
Catherine Pierce
Lawrence Raab
Ann K. Schwader
Tracy K. Smith
“Sci-Fi”
Mary Soon Lee
Holly Lyn Walrath
“All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell”
2020-present
Davian Aw
Beth Cato
“Field Trip to See the Mermaid”
Mark Dimaisip
Jack Kin Lim
Marissa Lingen
“Identity”
Terese Mason Pierre
“In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White”
Brandon O'Brien
Gretchen Tessmer