Though another Lander recently co-wrote (and recited) an original poem for the reopening of Manhattan’s Delacorte Theater:
Just adding my vote here. I know evil made a comeback in 2025, but her poem in 2021 just hit so hard after almost losing the nation January 6.
Yeah, fair point, “Footprints” is probably more culturally embedded but only in the US (and maybe other English-speaking countries to a lesser extent). “If I Must Die” is bound to have a higher profile globally.
I wouldn’t be too sure. The American evangelical Christian movement has been very influential world wide. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Footprints” has spread with it.
Which one does the artist prefer? Or- which one actually makes money.
Not to mention, he was actually popular and well known.
Look at the list since 2000- how many had anyone here heard of before they got the prize?
Very solid and moving but it was in 1946. How many of us were even born then?
That always gave me a chuckle.
Alice, Lets eat is hilarious and will make anyone hungry.
I’d argue it’s probably better known than most of the more recent examples being cited in this thread.
Yes, didn’t realize it had been autocorrected until after it was too late to change it.
I’m not sure that “outside of the English-speaking world” is a fair criterion, since poetry usually suffers much more in translation than other forms of literature. Though lands speaking other languages doubtless have their own native poetry that isn’t well-known in English, too.
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is 1945, so too late, but Randall Jarrell went to my high school, so I have to mention it.
From 2016 by a 6-year-old kid in DC:
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
Possibly but the question is not what’s the most culturally impactful modern poem, it’s what’s the most recent culturally impactful poem. All three are culturally impactful, and Still I Rise is the most recent.
I haven’t heard of most of the poems y’all are talking about. Now, i suppose I’m culturally out of it, but i think a lot of “poetry set to music” has had more cultural impact.
I’d say that’s may be the answer to the OP. It wasn’t super influential in the English speaking world (I had vaguely heard of it and the story around it’s author’s death). But if me, a non-arabic speaking person with no particular interest in poetry or connection to Palestine, has heard of it, I’d guess it’s a significant cultural phenomen in the Arab world?
High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, 1941, quoted by Reagan after the Challenger disaster, widely used after that.
"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—
wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air …
“Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
Oh okay, I thought from the OP that you were establishing somewhat more stringent criteria for “impact”, as in Star Wars or Harry Potter. I don’t think “And Still I Rise” is in that ballpark (probably “Footprints” isn’t either, but substantially closer). Still, your call.
I went to bed last night thinking “oh, I should mention ‘The Tiger,’” so, thanks for covering my shift for me.
@Kimstu makes the point that memes have usurped poems, but at least in terms of cultural weight I think there is also some meaningful overlap. Both in the sense that, I am guessing, “The Tiger” has been in front of more non-student eyes than a lot of The Classics over the last decade, and in the sense that Tumblr and other social platforms sometimes discover older poems and give them new life as things to riff on (William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say,” already mentioned, but Laura Gilpin’s 1976 “The Two-Headed Calf” got a significant resurrection in the early 2020s that way too).
We’re using different definitions of “long term”.
Is poetry from oral traditions not poetry? It seems very odd to me to define poetry as limited to literature.
My vote is for “And Still I Rise” but we’re dealing with some vague criteria here.
Yeah, that one hit weirdly hard the first time I read it.
Also from 2016 is Brian Bilston’s “America Is A Gun”.
As a bonus, it tends to cause MAGA frothing when encountered.
Almost all culturally significant (ie widely known and long remembered) poetry since about fifty years ago will be found in song or rap lyrics. At least in the Anglosphere. Limiting it to written and/or spoken word verse is a teeny-tiny subset gifted with academic importance.
I’ve never heard of Footprints. Not a UK thing. But I have heard of The Revolution WNBT.
Footprints isn’t really a poem, anyway. It’s an essay.