The greatest poems about being alone

The poet’s life is often viewed as a lonely one – starving in garrets, pining away for lost loves, moping about the streets of the city looking for Baudelaire-style inspiration – so it should come as little surprise that there have been many classic poems written about solitude and loneliness. Here are ten of our favourite poems about isolation and being alone.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29. One of the most famous sonnets written by Shakespeare, this one contains the line ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state’, thus casting the poet as both solitary and shunned. But there is hope for him as he reflects on the love of the Fair Youth with whom he appears (in the sequence as it unfolds) to be in a burgeoning relationship…

Alexander Pope, ‘Ode on Solitude’. The most remarkable thing about this poem…