Top 10 Horror Poems

10. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (Robert Browning) - Childe Roland has weird taste in porn, huh? Actually, the idea derives from a line spoken in passing in King Lear--by a guy pretending to be mad. Browning turns the poem into a delirious nightmare about a knight approaching a dark tower in some decaying landscape. Browning also wrote the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is kind of creepy; and Porphyria's Lover, which basically describes a man murdering a girl. That Browning, a right character he was.

9. "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard" (Thomas Gray) - Haunting and melancholy, Gray's masterpiece, the Elegy, is the pinnacle work of the Graveyard Poetry movement. The Graveyard Poets wrote metaphysical meditations on the subject of death and mortality, making use of macabre imagery and sometimes fantasy. As in Robert Blair's "The Grave,"

Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs;
Dead men have come again, and walked about;

The dead women, however, stayed at home and did the cooking.

Gray was more subtle than the other Graveyard Poets, but his poem packs more of a punch. It can be read here, http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Elegy.htm

8. The Changing Light at Sandover (James Merrill) - Sandover is an inherently creepy poem. A lengthy epic, it was composed laboriously over twenty years by means of a Ouija board. Merrill and his partner used the board to contact the spirits of dead poets, such as Plato, Ephraim, and Yeats, and with these spirits produced a haunting apocalyptic vision. Apparently plagiarizing the undead is legitimate.

7. Christabel (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) - A young girl named Christabel, praying in the woods, encounters a girl named Geraldine who claims to have been abducted from her home by strange men. Turns out Geraldine is a demon who is trying to insinuate herself into Christabel's life and perhaps become her lover. That's what you get for praying in the woods. This was a major influence on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.

6. Les Fleurs du Mal AKA Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire) - A collection of French, decadent poetry influenced largely by Poe.
Here's a sample: "The Vampire's Metamorphoses" (Baudelaire) - A short poem about a man being seduced by a vampiress when the sun suddenly rises (oops!). http://fleursdumal.org/poem/186

5. Maldoror (Lautremont) - Twisted, surreal, gory, Gothic, the poem centers on the satanic Maldoror, someone trapped amongst humanity, warring against god, pursued by police as evil incarnate, he goes through one nightmarish event after another. Many who read this find it to be life-changing.
Several underground filmmakers got together to make an avant-garde movie out of Maldoror, each taking a segment. You can see a good portion of the result here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B05F5E46C492F31D

4. Faust Part I (Goethe) - The classic story. Actually, Marlowe wrote Dr. Faustus quite a bit before Goethe, but it's Goethe's version that's the real masterpiece. Dr. Faust, tired of getting knowledge only through hard study, is given a rare treat by Mephisto: the opportunity to live a little! Most exciting is when Mephisto takes Faust to the Brocken (a mountain where witches gather) for Walpurgisnacht.

3. The Bacchae (Euripides) - Dionysus is in town and he's entranced all the females. These female followers of Dionysus (Bacchus), God of Wine and Ecstasy, are the Bacchae, women driven to their deep, atavistic core by the influence of the god. They tear apart a cow with their bare hands and later their own family members. Later they appear on the Jerry Springer show.

2. Dante's Inferno - While most of the Inferno is actually Dante getting revenge on people he hates by pretending they're in horrible torments in hell, it is still full of fiendish tortures. Also, some clawed creatures called the Malebranches give Dante a chase at some point. Satan is seen chewing on some bodies, Judas and Brutus, to be exact. Yum, Kellogs' Judas-Os!

1. "The Raven" (E. A. Poe) - It had to be The Raven. Come on!