Here is an updated and revised list of my recommendations from my video. Note: this is not the Harvard Bibliography (1983). This is a list inspired by many sources which are referenced at the end of the post here. It is by no means comprehensive; it does not represent my, or anyone else’s, “canon.” This is merely a beginner’s guide to the traditions of English poetry, a guide broadly imagined not as a destination but as as signposts toward literary discovery.
In 2024 I’ll be publishing a series of lectures on the history of English Poetry from Bible and Classical backgrounds to contemporary poets. Patreon supporters of the “Sponsor” tier (available December 26) will be invited to attend the live lectures followed by Q&A discussion and will have access to themed office hours with me where discuss readings of the month. I hope that these discussions will allow us to exchange reading recommendations and to introduce each other to poets not included on this (very limited) list!
1. The Bible and Classical Backgrounds
The Old Testament:
Genesis
Exodus
Judges
Ruth
I Samuel
Job
Psalms
Ecclesiastes
Song of Songs
Isaiah
Daniel
The New Testament:
The Four Gospels
Acts of the Apostles
Romans
I and II Corinthians
Hebrews
James
Revelation
Recommendations:
Christopher Hodgkins’s Literary Study of the Bible
Northrop Frye’s The Great Code
A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey
Greek Poetry:
Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey
Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony
The Homeric Hymns
Euripides’s Medea
Latin Poetry:
Virgil’s Aeneid
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Recommendations
Sir Paul Harvey’s The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature
2. English Literature from the beginning to 1500
Old English:
Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf
The lyric poems: “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Battle of Maldon,” “The Wife’s Lament” (not included on H-list).
Middle English:
William Langland’s Piers Plowman
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
The Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl
Recommendations:
Albert C. Baugh’s A Literary History of England (Part A)
Elaine Treharne’s Old and Middle English: An Anthology
E.K. Chamber’s English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages
H.S. Bennet’s Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century
Allan MacLain’s The Student’s Comprehensive Guide to the Canterbury Tales
3. English Literature from 1500 to 1660
Drama:
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine
Ben Jonson’s Volponeand Bartholomew Fair
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy
Shakespeare’s major works
Recommended Works:
Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Marjorie Garber’sShakespeare After All
L.C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson
T.S. Eliot’s Elizabethan Essays
Poetry:
John Skelton’s lyrics (see anthology recommendation)
Sir Thomas Wyatt (see anthology recommendation)
Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (see anthology recommendation)
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems
George Herbert’s The Temple
Robert Herrick’s Hesperides
Ben Jonson’s lyric poetry (see anthology recommendation)
Andrew Marvell’s lyric poetry (see anthology recommendation)
Thomas Trahern’s selected lyric poetry (see anthology recommendation)
Henry Vaughan’s selected lyric poetry from Silex Scintillans (see anthology recommendation)
Recommendations:
Douglas Bush’s Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition
A.C. Hamilton’s The Spenser Encyclopedia
C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (excluding drama)
Douglas Bush’s English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century
Michael Paine and John Hunter’s Renaissance Literature: An Anthology
4. English Literature from 1660 to 1790
Drama:
John Dryden’s All for Love and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
Lyric Poetry
John Milton’s Paradise Lost
John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis
Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad and An Essay on Criticism
Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes and “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet”
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
William Cowper’s “The Castaway” and The Task
Robert Burns’s selected lyric poetry (see anthology recommendation)
Recommendations:
John L. Mahoney’s The Enlightenment and English Literature
Gordon Teskey’s The Poetry of John Milton
James Sutherland’s English Literature in the Late Seventeenth Century
Bonamy Dobrée’s English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century
John Butt’s English Literature in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past
Geoffrey Tillotson’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Geoffrey Tillotson’s On the Poetry of Pope
5. English Literature from 1790 to 1890
William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Wordsworth The Lyrical Ballads (1802)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold and Don Juan
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Prometheus Unbound
John Keats’s selected poems and letters
Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Poems(text of 1777)
Helen Maria Williams Poems(1786)
Recommendations:
William Lindsay Renwick’s English Literature, 1789-1815
David Perkins’s English Romantic Writers: An Anthology
James Engell’s The Creative Imagination
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s selected lyrics and In Memoriam
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh
Robert Browning’s selected lyrics
Matthew Arnold’s shorter lyrics
Christina Rossetti’s lyrics
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lyrics
Recommendations:
W.E. Strange and G. R. Houghton’s Victorian Poetry and Poetics
Ian Jack’s English Literature, 1815-1832
Paul Turner’s Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose
6. American Literature to 1890
Anne Bradstreet’s lyrics
Edward Taylor’s lyrics
Psalms from The Bay Psalm Book
Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”
Ralph Waldo’s Emerson “The Sphinx” and “The Snow-Storm”
Emily Dickinson’s poems
Walt Whitman’s 1855 Preface to the Leaves of Grass and its poems
Recommendations:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes A and B
7. English and American Literature from 1890
Thomas Hardy’s poems (see anthology)
W.B. Yeats’s poems (see anthology)
Robert Frost’s poems (see anthology)
T.S. Eliot’s poems (see anthology)
Marianne Moore’s poems (see anthology)
Archibald Macleish’s poems (see anthology)
Langston Hughes’s poems (see anthology)
Philip Larkin’s poems (see anthology)
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
Sylvia Plath’s poems (see anthology)
Seamus Heaney’s poems (see anthology)
. . . Among many others. See Table of Contents in the anthology.
Recommendations:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
David Perkins’s The History of Modern Poetry (2 vols.)
J. I. M. Stewart’s Writers of the Early Twentieth Century: Hardy to Lawrence
8. Theory and Criticism (built along as we go, incorporated into lectures)
Walter Jackson Bate’s Criticism: The Major Texts
René Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism (7 vols.)
The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism
Works Referenced
Bibliography for English Undergraduate Concentrators, compiled by Members of the Tutorial Board and the Department of English and American Literature and Language.
Andrew Sanders’s The Short Oxford History of English Literature
The College Survey of English Literature, vols. I & II, ed. B.J. Whiting et al.
