Chapter 1 The Old and Medieval Period 1
1.1 An Introduction 1
1.2 Geoffrey Chaucer 2
Excerpts from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales1.3 Folk Ballads 7
"The Three Ravens" 12
"Get Up and Bar the Door" 12
Chapter 2 The Renaissance Period 12
2.1 An Introduction 12
2.2 Edmund Spenser 14
"Sonnet 75" 15
2.3 Christopher Marlowe 15
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" 17
2.4 William Shakespeare 17
"Sonnet 18" 27
"Sonnet 73" 27
An Excerpt from The Merchant of Venice 27
2.5 Francis Bacon 27
"Of Studies"from Essays 30
2.6 John Donne 30
"Valediction Forbidding Mourning" 33
"Death Be Not Proud" 33
2.7 George Herbert 33
"Virtue" 34
2.8 Ben Jonson 34
"Song—To Celia" 36
2.9 Robert Herrick 36
"To the Virgins.to Make Much of Time" 37
2.10 John Milton 37
An Excerpt from Paradise Lost 44
Chapter 3 The Neoclassical Period 44
3.1 An Introduction 44
3.2 John Dryden 46
An Excerpt from An Essay of Dramatic Poesy 49
3.3 John Bunyan 49
"The Vanity Fair":An Excerpt from The Pilgrim's Progress3.4 Jonathan Swift 53
An Excerpt from Gulliver's Travels 59
3.5 Alexander Pope 59
"Ode on Solitude" 61
3.6 Daniel Defoe 61
An Excerpt from Robinson Crusoe 65
3.7 Henry Fielding 65
An Excerpt from Tom Jones 70
3.8 Samuel Johnson 70
To the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield 73
3.9 Thomas Gray 73
An Excerpt from"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"3.10 Robert Burns 76
"A Red,Red Rose" 78
3.11 William Blake 78
"The Chimney Sweeper"(from Songs of Innocence) 81
"London" 81
Chapter 4 The Romantic Period 81
4.1 An Introduction 81
4.2 William Wordsworth 83
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" 87
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge" 87
"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" 87
4.3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 87
"Kubla Khan" 89
4.4 George Gordon Byron 89
"Song for the Luddites" 92
"She Walks in Beauty" 92
4.5 Percy Bysshe Shelley 92
"A Song:'Men of England'" 95
"Ozymandias" 95
4.6 John Keats 95
"To Autumn" 97
4.7 Jane Austen 97
An Excerpt from Pride and Prejudice 103
Chapter 5 The Victorian Period 103
5.1 An Introduction 103
5.2 Charles Dickens 104
An Excerpt from Great Expectations 112
5.3 Alfred Tennyson 112
"Break,Break,Break" 115
"Crossing the Bar" 115
"The Eagle" 115
5.4 Robert Browning 115
"Meeting at Night" 117
"Home-Thoughts,from Abroad" 117
5.5 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 117
"HoW Do I Love Thee?" 119
5.6 Charlotte Brontё 119
An Excerpt from Jane Eyre 127
5.7 Thomas Hardy 127
"The Man He Killed" 136
An Excerpt from Tess of the d'Urbervilles 136
Chapter 6 The Modern Period 136
6.1 An Introduction 136
6.2 George Bernard Shaw 140
An Excerpt from Pygmalion 147
6.3 William Butler Yeats 147
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" 150
"Down by the Salley Gardens" 150
6.4 T.S.Eliot 150
"The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" 157
6.5 James Joyce 157
"Araby"from Dubliners 163
6.6 D.H.Lawrence 163
An Excerpt from Sons and Lovers 169
6.7 Dylan Thomas 169
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" 171
6.8 William Golding 171
An Excerpt from Lord of the Flies 175
6.9 Ted Hughes 175
"Hawk Roosting" 177
6.10 Seamus Heaney 177
"Follower" 180
References 180