Fifty Shades of July: 50 of the best poems about the month of July

Written by Walt Whitman, William Blake, William Morris and 8 more

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Ghizela Rowe and Eve Karpf

The seventh month of the Gregorian calendar saunters into mid-summer. Temperatures rise still further. The landscape may wilt under oppressive heat but is still a spectacle of colour and structure that only Mother Nature has the resources for.

1 - Fifty Shades of July - An Introduction

2 - A July Afternoon by the Pond by Walt Whitman

3 - An Afternoon in July by Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

4 - I Saw England - July Night by Ivor Gurney

5 - A Soldiers Cemetery by John William Streets (Killed and Missing in Action on 1st July 1916 Aged 31)

6 - July 2nd 1863 by Tom Reynolds

7 - Fourth of July by Julia A Moore

8 - July 4th 1857 by Alfred Gibbs Campbell

9 - America, From The National Ode July 4th 1876 by James Bayard Taylor

10 - 4th July 1882, Malines, Midnight by James Kenneth Stephen

11 - Ode For the 4th of July by James Monroe Whitfield

12 - Ode For July 4th 1917 by H P Lovecraft

13 - Broadway, New York, July 1916 by George Sterling

14 - London in July by Amy Levy

15 - St Martin's Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson

16 - Between the Dusk of Summer by William Ernest Henley

17 - In This Summer by Daniel Sheehan

18 - Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day (Sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare

19 - A White Rose by John Boyle O'Reilly

20 - Epithalamion by Gerard Manley Hopkins

21 - The Sweets of the Rose by Hafiz

22 - The Rose by John Cournos

23 - The Secret Rose by William Butler Yeats

24 - The Forest Path by Lucy Maud Montgomery

25 - Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

26 - Sailing to Byzantium by W B Yeats

27 - Fancy in Nubibus or The Poet in the Clouds by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

28 - On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats

29 - Clouds by Mirabai

30 - Breton Afternoon by Ernest Christopher Dowson

31 - From My Diary July 1914 by Wilfred Owen

32 - How the Old Mountains Drip With Sunset by Emily Dickinson

33 - The Eagle by Alfred Lord Tennyson

34 - Sonnet LVII - Summit of Skiddaw, July 7th 1838 by Henry Alford

35 - July 9th 1872 by Abram Joseph Ryan

36 - On Leaving Ireland, July 14th 1916 by Tom Kettle

37 - On My Sons Return Out of England July 17th 1661 by Anne Bradstreet

38 - Sonnet July 18th 1787 by William Lisle Bowles

39 - Verses Upon the Burning of Our House July 18th 1666 by Anne Bradstreet

40 - Written in July by Samuel Rogers

41 - Summer Sun by Robert Louis Stevenson

42 - The School Boy by William Blake

43 - Answer July by Emily Dickinson

44 - Towser, a True Tale, 20th July 1806 by Robert Tannahill

45 - Summer Dawn by William Morris

46 - Summer by Alexander Pope

47 - A Night Rain in Summer by James Henry Leigh Hunt

48 - Summer Night by Alfred Lord Tennyson

49 - Sonnet at Dover Cliffs July 20th 1787 by William Lisle Bowles

50 - Picnic July 1917 by Rose Macaulay

51 - Sonnet at Ostend July 22nd 1787 by William Lisle Bowles

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839678912

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born in Long Island on the 31st May 1819 to Walter Whitman, a carpenter and farmer, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. Walt was one of eight siblings and was taken out of school at the age of eleven to start work, but he continued to read voraciously and visit museums. He worked first as a printer, then briefly as a teacher before settling on a career in journalism. He self-published the first version of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of only twelve poems, in 1855. By the time he died in 1892, and despite arousing considerable controversy, he enjoyed unprecedented international success and to this day is considered to be one of America’s greatest poets.