You will be confronting many great works of poetry in your literature classes at Marian. While you will probably not encounter all of the following authors in your courses, all have received widespread attention, and we have grouped them according to literary periods so that you can get a sense of the unfolding literary history that is sometimes called "The Great Tradition. Some of the poets listed below have enjoyed wider recognition and have exerted greater influence than others, and their names appear in bold print. Also, we have indicated the courses in which the various poets might be encountered, to give you a better sense of the sequencing of courses in the English program.

Some of the names represent authors of widely acclaimed masterpieces, the length of which may prevent full treatment in class. We have identified such "must-read" works so that you can, if you choose, supplement the classwork with outside-of-class reading, or prepare for classes in advance.

Early British: (En 201)

Sixteenth-, Seventeenth-Century British: (En 201)

And others, such as...

Thomas Campion (1 567-1620)
 Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)
Thomas Carew (1595-1640) 
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
 Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618)
Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) 
John Skelton (1460-1529)
Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)
 Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)
Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
 Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
Robert Herrick (1591-1674) 
Edmund Waller (1606-1687)
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
 Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1651)

Eighteenth-Century British Poets (En 202),

especially . . .

William Cowper (1731-1800)
George Crabbe (1754-1832)
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
James Thomson (1700.1748)

Nineteenth-Century British Romantic (and pre-Romantic) poets, especially . . .

Nineteenth-Century British Victorian poets, especially...

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

And others, such as...

Lewis Carroll (1812-1898)
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883)
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909)
Edward Lear (1812-1888) 
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
William Morris (1834-1896)

Twentieth-Century British poets, especially . . .

And others, such as...

Arthur Hugh Clough 1819-1861)
Ted Hughes(1930-)
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Philip Larkin (1922.1985)
Tom Gunn (1929-)
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)
Tony Harrison (1937-) 
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
Seamus Heaney (1939-)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Geoffrey Hill (1932-)
Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
Susan Hill (1942-)
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
A.E. Housman (1859.1936)

Colonial and Eighteenth-Century American Poets, including...

Joel Barlow (1754-1812)
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672)
Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
Edward Taylor (1642?-1729)
Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)

Nineteenth-Century American Poets, including...

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) 
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) 
Henry Timrod (1828-1867)
Frances Harper (1825-1911)
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) 
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

Twentieth-Century American Poetry: