Comprehensive Reading List
Bible: Genesis, Exodus 1-2, Samuel, Job, Four Gospels
Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
Vergil: The Aeneid
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Anon: Beowulf
Anon: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales ("General Prologue," "Miller's Tale," "Wife of Bath's Tale," "Merchant's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," "Pardoner's Tale")
More: Utopia
Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Book I
Milton: Paradise Lost
Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Wordsworth: The Prelude, Books 1-2, 6, 10, 13-14
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Eliot: "The Waste Land"
Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
Vergil: The Aeneid
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Anon: Beowulf
Anon: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales ("General Prologue," "Miller's Tale," "Wife of Bath's Tale," "Merchant's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," "Pardoner's Tale")
More: Utopia
Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Book I
Milton: Paradise Lost
Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Wordsworth: The Prelude, Books 1-2, 6, 10, 13-14
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Eliot: "The Waste Land"
Fielding: Joseph Andrews
Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Austen: Emma
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Melville: Moby Dick
Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Eliot: Middlemarch
Dickens: David Copperfield
James: The Portrait of a Lady
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Hardy: The Return of the Native
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Austen: Emma
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Melville: Moby Dick
Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Eliot: Middlemarch
Dickens: David Copperfield
James: The Portrait of a Lady
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Hardy: The Return of the Native
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Aeschylus: Oresteia, Prometheus
Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides: The Bacchae
Aristophanes: The Frogs
Anon: Everyman, Second Shepherd's Play
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare: Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV & V, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest
Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
Becket: Waiting for Godot
Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides: The Bacchae
Aristophanes: The Frogs
Anon: Everyman, Second Shepherd's Play
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare: Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV & V, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest
Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
Becket: Waiting for Godot
Bible: Selected Psalms: Psalm 23,42,130, 137; The Song of Solomon 8
Anglo-Saxon: "The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," "Caedmon's Hymn"
Middle-English: "I Sing of a Maiden," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Corpus Christi Carol," "Western Wind"
Wyatt: "Whoso List to Hunt"
Raleigh: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
Sidney: Astrophel and Stella, 1
Shakespeare: Sonnets 29, 65, 73, 116, 129, 146; "Full Fathom Five"
Donne: "The Canonization," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Good-Morrow," "Holy Sonnets 10 and 14
Jonson: "To Penshurst," "On My First Son," "Queen and Huntress, Chaste and Fair"
Herrick: "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," "Corinna's Going A-Maying"
Herbert: "The Altar" "Virtue," "The Pulley," "The Collar," "Easter Wings," "Love (III)"
Vaughn: "The World"
Milton: "Lycidas," "On Morning of Christ's Nativity," "How Soon Hath Time," "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"
Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden"
Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Blake: "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Sick Rose," "London"
Wordsworth: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "Ode: On Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Surprised by Joy"
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An Ode"
Shelley: "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "Mont Blanc"
Keats: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," "Bright Star"
Tennyson: "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," In Memoriam 1, 7, 55, 56
Browning: "My Last Duchess," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
Arnold: "Dover Beach"
Whitman: "Song of Myself" (1), "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Vigil Strange Kept I on the Field One Night"
Dickinson: "Success is Counted Sweetest," "There's a Certain Slant of Light," "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes," "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," "Because I Could not Stop for Death,""Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant"
Hopkins: "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Spring and Fall"
Hardy: "Hap," "The Darkling Thrush"
Housman: "To an Athlete Dying Young,"
Yeats: "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Leda and the Swan," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Adam's Curse"
Eliot: The Waste Land, "Preludes," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Journey of the Magi"
Frost: "Birches," After Apple-Picking," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "The Road Not Taken," "Design"
Stevens: "Sunday Morning," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Snow Man"
Auden: "Muse des Beaux Arts," "The Shield of Achilles"
Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Bishop: "One Art"
Heaney: "Digging"
Wilbur: "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World"
Williams: "This is Just to Say"
Anglo-Saxon: "The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," "Caedmon's Hymn"
Middle-English: "I Sing of a Maiden," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Corpus Christi Carol," "Western Wind"
Wyatt: "Whoso List to Hunt"
Raleigh: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
Sidney: Astrophel and Stella, 1
Shakespeare: Sonnets 29, 65, 73, 116, 129, 146; "Full Fathom Five"
Donne: "The Canonization," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Good-Morrow," "Holy Sonnets 10 and 14
Jonson: "To Penshurst," "On My First Son," "Queen and Huntress, Chaste and Fair"
Herrick: "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," "Corinna's Going A-Maying"
Herbert: "The Altar" "Virtue," "The Pulley," "The Collar," "Easter Wings," "Love (III)"
Vaughn: "The World"
Milton: "Lycidas," "On Morning of Christ's Nativity," "How Soon Hath Time," "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"
Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden"
Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Blake: "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Sick Rose," "London"
Wordsworth: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "Ode: On Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Surprised by Joy"
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An Ode"
Shelley: "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "Mont Blanc"
Keats: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," "Bright Star"
Tennyson: "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," In Memoriam 1, 7, 55, 56
Browning: "My Last Duchess," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
Arnold: "Dover Beach"
Whitman: "Song of Myself" (1), "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Vigil Strange Kept I on the Field One Night"
Dickinson: "Success is Counted Sweetest," "There's a Certain Slant of Light," "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes," "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," "Because I Could not Stop for Death,""Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant"
Hopkins: "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Spring and Fall"
Hardy: "Hap," "The Darkling Thrush"
Housman: "To an Athlete Dying Young,"
Yeats: "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Leda and the Swan," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Adam's Curse"
Eliot: The Waste Land, "Preludes," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Journey of the Magi"
Frost: "Birches," After Apple-Picking," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "The Road Not Taken," "Design"
Stevens: "Sunday Morning," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Snow Man"
Auden: "Muse des Beaux Arts," "The Shield of Achilles"
Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Bishop: "One Art"
Heaney: "Digging"
Wilbur: "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World"
Williams: "This is Just to Say"
Plato: Book 3 and 10 of The Republic
Aristotle: The Poetics
Sidney: "The Defence of Poesy"
Pope: "Essay on Criticism"
Jonson: "Preface to Shakespeare"
Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (Chapter 13)
Keats: Selected Letters
Shelley: "A Defense of Poetry"
Arnold: "The Study of Poetry"
Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
James: "Preface to Portrait of a Lady (1908)"
Conrad: "Preface to Nigger of the Narcissus"
Woolf: "Modern Fiction"
Stevens: "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
Aristotle: The Poetics
Sidney: "The Defence of Poesy"
Pope: "Essay on Criticism"
Jonson: "Preface to Shakespeare"
Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (Chapter 13)
Keats: Selected Letters
Shelley: "A Defense of Poetry"
Arnold: "The Study of Poetry"
Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
James: "Preface to Portrait of a Lady (1908)"
Conrad: "Preface to Nigger of the Narcissus"
Woolf: "Modern Fiction"
Stevens: "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"