Those years between childhood and adulthood known as adolescence are often tumultuous, angst-filled, mercurial, amongst other adjectives. While adults may not take the troubles that teens face nearly as seriously as teens themselves do, it is impossible to deny that the emotions felt by teens are powerful. No longer children and not yet adults, teens face a world in which they sometimes feel has no place for them.

Poems about teens are, then full of both the joy of discovery and the pain of disappointment and confusion. The best teenage poems make a teen’s emotions not only clear, but sympathetic to all that read them. Others gently – or not so gently – poke fun at teenage angst.

One who likes to poke fun is Ogden Nash, who crystallized the nature of teenage romance in his poem about amorous teens “The Romantic Age:”

The much more sympathetic John Dryden understood the confusion and overwhelming emotion that teenagers, between childhood and adulthood, often face. In “Song (Sylvia The Fair, In the Bloom of Fifteen), he recounts one teenage girl’s first encounter with sex:

Perhaps no poem makes the conflicting feelings of a teenager clearer than Dimitri Shostakovich’s “My Mood is Like a Cloudy Moon,” which will help adults understand the whirlwind of emotions that exist in an adolescent: