Fellow poetry readers: this is a website designed to help you study and understand lyric poetry of all kinds. If you would like to provide feedback, please e-mail me at nyc@lyrici.net. Below is a basic list of approximately 100 poems that will be the subject of my study and commentary. My current idea is to expand it further into a selection of about 300 poems that best represent the different facets of Anglo-American poetic culture in its historical context.
|
PERIOD |
POET |
DATES |
TITLE |
|
Anglo-Saxon |
Anonymous |
|
"The Seafarer" |
|
14th Century |
Geoffrey Chaucer |
(1343-1400) |
"Truth" |
|
15th Century |
Anonymous |
|
"Western Wind" |
|
|
Anonymous |
|
"Love Me Little, Love Me Long" |
|
|
Anonymous |
|
"As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham" |
|
16th Century |
Thomas Wyatt |
(1503-1542) |
"The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor" |
|
|
Queen Elizabeth I |
(1533-1603) |
"When I Was Fair and Young" |
|
|
Barnabe Googe |
(1540-1594) |
"Of Money" |
|
|
Chidiock Tichborne |
(d. 1586) |
"Tichborne's Elegy" |
|
|
Sir Walter Raleigh |
(c. 1552-1618) |
"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepard" |
|
|
Edmund Spenser |
(c. 1552-1599) |
Sonnet 68 |
|
|
|
|
Sonnet 70 |
|
|
Sir Philip Sydney |
(1554-1586) |
Poem #1 from Astrophel and Stella |
|
|
Samuel Daniel |
(c. 1562-1619) |
Poem #6 from Delia |
|
|
|
|
"Love Is a Sickness" |
|
|
Christopher Marlowe |
(1564-1593) |
"The Passionate Shepard to His Love" |
|
|
William Shakespeare |
(1564-1616) |
Sonnet 18 |
|
|
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Sonnet 29 |
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|
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Sonnet 30 |
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|
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Sonnet 94 |
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|
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Sonnet 116 |
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|
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Sonnet 130 |
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|
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Sonnet 138 |
|
|
Thomas Campion |
(1567-1620) |
"My Sweetest Lesbia" |
|
|
John Donne |
(1572-1631) |
Sonnet 10, from Holy Sonnets |
|
|
|
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Sonnet 14, from Holy Sonnets |
|
|
|
|
"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" |
|
|
|
|
"The Flea" |
|
|
|
|
"Meditation XVII: No Man Is an Island" |
|
|
Ben Jonson |
(1573-1637) |
"Song: To Celia" |
|
|
|
|
"Queen and Huntress" |
|
|
Robert Herrick |
(1591-1674) |
"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" |
|
17th Century |
Edmund Waller |
(1607-1687) |
"Song" ("Go, lovely rose") |
|
|
John Milton |
(1608-1674) |
"When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" |
|
|
|
|
"To the Lord General Cromwell" |
|
|
Richard Lovelace |
(1618-1657) |
"To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" |
|
|
Andrew Marvell |
(1621-1678) |
"To His Coy Mistress" |
|
|
John Dryden |
(1631-1700) |
"Song from Troilus and Cressida" |
|
18th Century |
Samuel Johnson |
(1709-1784) |
"The Vanity of Human Wishes" |
|
|
William Cowper |
(1731-1800) |
"Light Shining out of Darkness" from Olney Hymns |
|
|
William Blake |
(1757-1827) |
"The Clod and the Pebble" |
|
|
|
|
"Auguries of Innocence" |
|
|
Robert Burns |
(1759-1796) |
"To a Mouse" |
|
|
William Wordsworth |
(1770-1850) |
"It Is a Beauteous Evening" |
|
|
|
|
"My Heart Leaps Up" |
|
|
|
|
"The World Is Too Much with Us" |
|
|
Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
(1772-1834) |
"Kubla Khan" |
|
|
|
|
Excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” |
|
|
George Gordon, Lord Byron |
(1788-1824) |
“She Walks in Beauty” |
|
|
|
|
"So We'll Go No More A-Roving” |
|
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley |
(1792-1822) |
“Hymn of Apollo” |
|
|
|
|
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” |
|
|
|
|
“Ode to the West Wind” |
|
|
|
|
[This Is the Day] Excerpt from Prometheus Unbound |
|
|
John Keats |
(1795-1821) |
"When I Have Fears" |
|
|
|
|
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" |
|
|
|
|
"To Autumn" |
|
19th Century |
Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
(1806-1861) |
"Sonnet 1" |
|
|
|
|
"Sonnet 43" |
|
|
Edgar Allen Poe |
(1809-1849) |
"Sonnet--To Science" |
|
|
|
|
"To Helen" |
|
|
Alfred, Lord Tennyson |
(1809-1892) |
"Charge of the Light Brigade" |
|
|
Robert Browning |
(1812-1889) |
"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" |
|
|
Walt Whitman |
(1819-1892) |
"Song of Myself" |
|
|
Matthew Arnold |
(1822-1888) |
"Dover Beach" |
|
|
Christina Rossetti |
(1830-1894) |
"A Birthday" |
|
|
|
|
"Song" |
|
|
Emily Dickinson |
(1830-1886) |
341 "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" |
|
|
|
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449 "I died for Beauty" |
|
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829 "Ample make this Bed" |
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
(1840-1928) |
"I Look into My Glass" |
|
|
|
|
In Time of "The Breaking of Nations" |
|
|
Gerard Manley Hopkins |
(1844-1889) |
"The Habit of Perfection" |
|
|
|
|
“God’s Grandeur” |
|
|
|
|
"Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" |
|
|
A. E. Housman |
(1859-1936) |
"Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" |
|
|
|
|
"When I Was One-and-Twenty" |
|
|
|
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"With Rue My Heart Is Laden" |
|
|
|
|
"The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux" |
|
|
Rudyard Kipling |
(1865-1936) |
“If” |
|
|
|
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"The White Man's Burden" |
|
|
|
|
“Recessional” |
|
|
W. B. Yeats |
(1865-1939) |
"Down by the Salley Gardens" |
|
|
|
|
“Sailing to Byzantium” |
|
|
|
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"The Second Coming" |
|
|
|
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"Under Ben Bulben" |
|
|
Robert Frost |
(1874-1963) |
"The Road Not Taken" |
|
|
|
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"Birches" |
|
|
|
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"The Gift Outright" |
|
|
Wallace Stevens |
(1879-1955) |
"Sunday Morning" |
|
|
Ezra Pound |
(1885-1972) |
“The Garden” |
|
|
|
|
"The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter" |
|
|
T.S. Eliot |
(1888-1965) |
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" |
|
|
|
|
Excerpt from "The Waste Land" |
|
|
Wilfred Owen |
(1893-1918) |
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" |
|
20th Century |
W. H. Auden |
(1907-1973) |
"September 1, 1939" |
|
|
|
|
"As I Walked Out One Evening" |
|
|
|
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"Funeral Blues" |
|
|
|
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"Law Like Love" |
|
|
|
|
"O Tell Me the Truth about Love" |