Do men need poems?

Is the gender of brawn and ‘can-do’ really a candidate for honeyed verse?

Obviously yes. Through the centuries men seem to dominate the writing of poetry. From books of epics to quatrains of love poetry it seemed to be a man’s world. His domain.

But take away the stirring deeds of adventure and much of what remains was written in the admiration or pursuit of women.

A volume purely for men, to show other facets of their personalities and characters seems to be an obvious choice. One verse fits all is, in fact, far removed from the truth.

Men needs words. They need support, understanding as well as goals, ambition and structure. They need purpose, desire; the need to love and be loved.

1 - Poems for Men - An Introduction

2 - If by Rudyard Kipling

3 - Invictus by William Ernest Henley

4 - A Man's A Man For A' That by Robert Burns

5 - A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

6 - For the Man Who Fails by Paul Laurence Dunbar

7 - The Life of Man by Sir Francis Bacon

8 - Is There Any Wise Man by Kabir

9 - I Saw a Man Pursuing The Horizon by Stephen Crane

10 - Till Man Destroy's Self by Rumi

11 - A Man Saw a Ball of Gold in the Sky by Stephen Crane

12 - An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

13 - A Man Went Before A Strange God by Stephen Crane

14 - Wondrous Sight For Men by Ann Griffiths

15 - The Man to the Angel by George William Russell

16 - The Blind Ploughman by Radclyffe Hall

17 - A Man Toiled on a Burning Road by Stephen Crane

18 - Ay, Workman, Make Me a Dream by Stephen Crane

19 - To a Gentleman by Robert Burns

20 - St Patrick Was a Gentleman by Henry Bennett

21 - A Song - Men of England by Percy Bysshe Shelley

22 - The True Born Englishman (An Excerpt) by Daniel Defoe

23 - England to Free Men by John Galsworthy

24 - I Travell'd Among Unknown Men by William Wordsworth

25 - Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

26 - Song. That Women Are But Men's Shadows by Ben Jonson

27 - My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

28 - Women's Tongue by Robert Tannahill

29 - You Men by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

30 - Rose of All the World by D. H. Lawrence

31 - Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

32 - Men Are Heavens Piers by Robert Louis Stevenson

33 - She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron

34 - Destroyer of Ships, Men, Cities by James Elroy Flecker

35 - The Romance of the Knight by Thomas Chatterton

36 - The Merman by Alfred Lord Tennyson

37 - Mandalay by Rudyard Kipling

38 - The Flying Dutchman by Edwin Arlington Robinson

39 - The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

40 - John Marr and Other Sailors by Herman Melville

41 - The Old Man of the Sea by Oliver Wendell Holmes

42 - Sailing To Byzantium by W. B. Yeats

43 - Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

44 - Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

45 - The Youth of Man by Matthew Arnold

46 - A Man Young and Old - Summer and Spring by William Butler Yeats

47 - The Man Who Will Not Know Another by Patrick Branwell Bronte 48 - Of Any Old Man by Isaac Rosenberg

49 - Old Man by Edward Thomas 50 - When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats

51 - Wishes of an Elderly Man Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914 by Walter Alexander Raleigh 52 - The Parable of the Old Man & the Young by Wilfred Owen

53 - Men Who March Away by Thomas Hardy 54 - For the Men at the Front by John Oxenham

55 - Dead Man's Dump by Isaac Rosenberg 56 - Marching Men by Marjorie Pickthall 57 - I Tracked a Dead Man Down a Trench by Walter S. S. Lyon

58 - The Three Lads by Elizabeth Chandler Forman 59 - A Ballad of the Ranks by Arthur Conan Doyle

60 - Men of Verdun by Lawrence Binyon 61 - Soldier by Rupert Brooke

62 - Soldier From the Wars Returning by A. E. Housman 63 - I Saw a Man This Morning by Patrick Shaw Stewart

64 - Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson 65 - The Charge of The Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson

66 - Song of Marion's Men by William Cullen Bryant 67 - Dupont''s Round Fight (November 1861) by Herman Melville

68 - Dance of the Hanged Men by Arthur Rimbaud 69 - The Hunters of Men by John Greenleaf Whittier

70 - The Madman's Song by John Webster 71 - Mothers of Men by Edwin J. Ellis

72 - Portrait of My Father As a Young Man by Rainer Maria Rilke

73 - The Father by Katharine Tynan 74 - Come Up from the Fields Father by Walt Whitman

75 - A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning by John Donne 76 - The Sick Man and the Nightingale by Amy Levy

77 - Dead Men's Love by Rupert Brooke 78 - Oh Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman

79 - The Dead Man Walking by Thomas Hardy 80 - The Dying Man and the Vulture by Khalil Gibran

80 - Death Be Not Proud by John Donne