SPECIFIED READINGS LIST
Anglo-Saxon and Medieval
• from Beowulf, “The Coming of Grendel”;
“The Coming of Beowulf”;
“The Battle with Grendel”;
“The Burning of Beowulf’s Body”
(if using Athena edition) / “The Farewell”
(if using Prentice-Hall edition)
• from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales, “The Prologue” (Lines 1–42,
Knight, Squire, Nun, Monk, Friar, Oxford
Cleric, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plowman,
Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner)
• “Bonny Barbara Allan” (ballad)
• from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(lines 1 to the end if using the Athena
edition, and lines 259 to the end if using
Prentice-Hall edition)
18th Century and Romantic • Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To the Ladies”
• Alexander Pope, from The Rape of the
Lock (Canto III and V excerpts)
• Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”
• Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
• William Blake, “The Tiger”;
“The Lamb”
• Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard”
• William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps
Up”; “The World Is Too Much with Us”
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner”
• George Gordon, Lord Byron,
“Apostrophe to the Ocean”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West
Wind”
• John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”;
“When I Have Fears That I May
Cease to Be”
Renaissance and 17th Century
• Sir Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
• Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate
Shepherd to his Love”
• Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply
to the Shepherd”
• William Shakespeare, Sonnets 29, 116,
130; Hamlet, King Lear or The Tempest
• John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning”; “Death, Be Not Proud”
• Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins”
• John Milton, “On His Blindness”;
from Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 1–263)
• Samuel Pepys, “The Fire of London”
Victorian and 20th Century
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43
• Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
• Emily Brontë, “Song”
• Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
• Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”
• Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not
Stop for Death”
• Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
• William Butler Yeats, “The Second
Coming”
• T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
• Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into
That Good Night”
• Stevie Smith, “Pretty”
• Margaret Atwood, “Disembarking at
