Poet Names
Poet-inspired names can honor a writer through a given name, a surname, or a pen name. Each note identifies the poet and the type of connection, while the statistics show the separate American history of the chosen spelling.
| Save name | Name & connection | History 1926–2025, yearly counts; individually scaled | Babies 2025 · rank | 5-year rank movement | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Emily Dickinson, the American poet. | 5,451#34 | Down 16 rank positions in five years | 1999 | ||
Amanda Gorman, the poet. | 601#493 | Down 49 rank positions in five years | 1987 | ||
Christina Rossetti, the poet. | 352#770 | Down 163 rank positions in five years | 1985 | ||
Sara Teasdale, the poet. | 1,568#198 | Down 15 rank positions in five years | 1981 | ||
Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet. | 72#2,463 | Down 378 rank positions in five years | 1918 | ||
Sylvia Plath, the poet. | 1,017#300 | Up 202 rank positions in five years | 1937 | ||
Lucille Clifton, the poet. | 1,314#239 | Up 35 rank positions in five years | 1920 | ||
The surname of poet and artist William Blake. | 1,080#316 | Down 107 rank positions in five years | 2012 | ||
Gwendolyn Brooks, the poet. | 848#360 | Up 18 rank positions in five years | 1953 | ||
The surname of poet Lord Byron. | 233#981 | Down 191 rank positions in five years | 1964 | ||
The surname of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. | 13#8,278 | Down 763 rank positions in five years | 1964 | ||
The surname of poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. | 1,371#254 | Up 14 rank positions in five years | 2025 | ||
The surname of poet W. H. Auden. | 89#1,794 | Down 426 rank positions in five years | 2020 | ||
The surname of poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. | 36#3,285 | Up 1,357 rank positions in five years | 2024 | ||
The surname of poet Alfred Tennyson. | 23#4,520 | Down 1,260 rank positions in five years | 2014 | ||
The surname of poet Langston Hughes. | 24#4,308 | Up 613 rank positions in five years | 1916 | ||
The surname of poet Walt Whitman. | 33#3,507 | Up 217 rank positions in five years | 2018 | ||
Audre Lorde, the poet and essayist. | —Unranked | — | 1927 | ||
The name by which the Persian-language poet is widely known. | 81#1,931 | Up 353 rank positions in five years | 2025 | ||
The surname of poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. | 9#8,867 | Down 4,858 rank positions in five years | 2020 | ||
A spelling associated with the Persian poet also called Hafez. | 8#9,197 | new | 2016 | ||
The surname of poet John Keats. | —Unranked | — | 2014 | ||
The surname of poet Robert Frost. | 13#6,576 | new | 2025 | ||
The name by which the Persian poet is widely known. | —Unranked | — | 2023 |
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Sources & methodology
Meaning summaries use Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and referenced name histories. Each name’s detail page includes its sources.
Membership on this list is editorial — we chose names that genuinely fit the theme. Every number is from official birth data: "—" means the name had fewer than 5 recorded uses in 2025, which makes it a genuinely rare pick today, not an invalid one. The dot marks whether the stats shown are for the girls' or boys' use of the name.