Original subtitles

Over the last century, English departments across the United States,

Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Columbia built reading lists that shaped

generations of reading literature. But very few people today get a chance to

study literature in the very structured cumulative way that these old curricula

were designed to offer.

So if you've watched my video about the changes in literature departments over

the past few years, you know that many English departments in the U.S. no

longer have a comprehensive list of traditions of great literature, and they

definitely don't promote any sort of canon these days at least most of them

don't so i've gone back to the archives i've dug through mid-century course

catalogs reading lists and syllabi and studied the old degree requirements to

recover for you a coherent map of the literary tradition for self-learners

such as many of my viewers on this channel.

And this list I have organized, creates or recreates a canon of literature that

was most commonly taught in English departments.

And instead of organizing things chronologically, beginning from the

Bible and classical literature all the way up to modernism, I've actually

organized it around genres.

The way literature feels when you're... inside it, inside the study of it. That

is a set of living genres that you can watch unfold across thousands of years.

And that's actually very important to have a comprehensive view of the genre

because then you can see and you can hear the texts talking to each other.

So using this canon for yourself is simple.

Choose one of the five major genres.

Epic, lyric, drama, the novel, or essays and criticism.

and follow it from its biblical and classical origins all the way to

modernism. And this lets you understand what was written and how forms evolve,

how each generation makes it new, rewrites the one that came before, and

how great genres of literature all participate and carry on the

conversation across centuries.

And that's actually the invitation to all of you artists out there watching

this now to participate in this great tradition.

or lineage.

And the result of this kind of vertical curriculum that I've designed, this kind

of reading pilgrimage of the five paths through the tradition that anyone can

follow, is that you see how the deep structure of English literature from its

foundations emerges all the way up to what's being written today.

Now let me say a word about how to use this list. It's a very big list. This is

probably going to be the longest YouTube video I've done so far, but

Let's begin with literature.

Literature exists for experience, and that is a formation.

This isn't to make you clever or more interesting at parties.

That's not what reading is about.

This is not a sprint, either. You will die not having read many things you

should have read, and if you aren't at peace with that, then you really need to

be at peace with that eventually.

You need to be selective and deliberate in your reading. Don't try to just check

off books from a list.

You want to move slowly, carefully through these works because you're

training a mind grounded in tradition rather than whatever the current

fashions of the markets are.

You are learning to read symbols. You will learn to cultivate a moral and

living imagination and you'll begin to perceive literature more of...

more as a conversation than as a collection of isolated texts.

And that's where the real magic begins, because you will recognize how genres

are always seeing and saying, epic in identity, speaking with vision, the

lyric as a form of emotion and perception, a drama as really the spirit

of narrative on stage.

The novel is consciousness, and an essay is very disciplined and carefully

worded. thought.

So this list is designed so as not to overwhelm you. It will, I hope, orient

you. It gives a map that earlier generations of students took for granted

and that we can draw from ourselves.

So over time, you study this list, you will become a reader who can sit in

silence with long poems and hear more than just a story.

It's different. You'll notice there's a difference between reading a novel for

fun and reading a novel and actually kind of understanding how the language

and the characters are intimately and intricately formed through language.

You'll be able to hear what a civilization is thinking by the stories

it's telling itself.

This is actually a very disturbing insight to attain, actually, because

your symbolic and mythological literacy is going to make you see things that you

haven't seen before. So I warn you.

Reading like this is going to change you and how you see the world we live in

now. Gradually, without even noticing the exact moment when it happens, you

will find that these works have formed you.

So, let's begin with the epic.

Epics are narratives in which a whole national or social imagination becomes

solidified. I was going to say canonized, but that happens much later.

These are stories of heroes, usually, of gods, the foundations of civilizations,

usually involving some form of catastrophe.

But when you trace an epic from the biblical foundations and classical

foundations all the way up to modernism, you're going to see this genre is really

grasping at some of the most pressing questions of our existence.

Where do we come from?

How do nations, civilizations, rise and fall?

And what does it mean to act as an individual within a larger cosmic drama?

And that's also something that drama will take up as well. We get to see the

individual around all of these social and cosmic pressures.

So following these epics across the centuries, you'll see how heroic ideals

have evolved, how allegory can...

participate in this through a replacement of legend or myth.

And also you'll see how spiritual conflict replaces a battlefield glory.

And that's really once you get past the Renaissance and early modern literature.

The modern world really reinvents the idea of the hero through this genre. And

the epic is really the great grandparent of the novel.

So my advice about epics is to not rush them.

Read them consistently. Make sure you don't stop for long periods of time

because epic poetry is meant to be experienced.

You can't squeeze the meaning out of it like a lemon. You have to actually be

there, be present, inhabit the poem.

Read aloud when you can.

Track images and patterns more than events.

You know, the narrative is important, but you'll get the narrative.

But instead, notice patterns.

repeated patterns, the journeys, the cycles, the descents, and the coming

back up again, the invocations, the homecomings. All of these are very

important patterns, motifs of the genre.

So epics will train the soul to think in large arcs. You'll be thinking about

fate, divine will, sacrifice, and civilization.

All of these are very... long arcs. So you're not just looking for a suspense

or the story, you're also decoding a dream of civilization, really.

You're learning how a culture dreams of itself and sometimes dreams itself into

existence. So let's begin with the biblical foundation.

Epic begins in English literature with the biblical narratives that provided a

blueprint for later English poets.

Now, The Hebrew poets did not conceive of epics in the same way that the Greeks

did, or the Latins.

But there are clear overlaps in theme and form.

I'm going to give you a list of the basics of biblical epic that you can

read in six weeks.

These are works that you return to when you want to rebuild your literary

foundations. And the most important books to read are the first two books of

the Hebrew Bible, sometimes called the Old Testament, Genesis and Exodus.

Genesis is the book of beginnings.

Its title means origin.

It traces creation, the fall, the flood, the patriarchs of Israel. And it matters

greatly to English literature because it establishes the symbolic grammar of not

just English literature, but the Western ideas about sin, covenant, exile,

nation, and law.

And that leads us into Exodus, which is the second book. It's the origin story

of the nation of Israel and their deliverance from Egyptian slavery by

Moses. And if you're a fast reader and finish these two books, you should move

on to the book of Judges, which is a cyclical history of Israel's spiritual

decline.

episodic deliveries through its flawed heroes. This is where you get the story

of Samson and Delilah.

Its important lies in the fact that it's a portrait of moral instability at the

cost of living without a unifying vision.

And for them at that time, that was not having a king.

One of the repeated phrases you'll hear in the book of Judges, and there was no

king in those days, and everyone did according to what was right in their own

eyes. So it's deeply moral.

and it influences a lot of what we'll be studying next.

After Judges, read Job.

This is a poetic consideration of divine silence in the face of human suffering.

It's not always the most satisfying read, but you're going to have to

wrestle with it, just as Jacob did with his angels, and just as many of the

rabbis and Christian commentators have tried to make sense of it as well.

It's not really an epic, but it's the closest thing to an epic, I think,

compared to the other genres we have here.

Then you'll want to move on to 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. These are the

national epics which contain the life of the warrior king, King David.

So if you have time to spare, after all of that, you should read 1 and 2

Chronicles and the Book of Daniel.

The Book of Daniel is definitely a wild ride that I think will...

help prepare you for when you read Blake.

But yes, Book of Daniel, one of the prophets.

Now let's move into classical literature.

When a reader moves into the classical foundations of the epic, with Homer,

with Virgil, they see how the heroic code is formalized and how you can

actually see the divine action acting within the human striving.

And that's why the English readers, the English writers, returned to these

models for many centuries.

The classical And the biblical epic are pretty distinct in the sense that they

are not drawing upon one another.

So Homer and Virgil, well, at least Homer didn't have access to the Hebrew.

Virgil probably did. And it seems like he, in his Georgics, he at least alludes

to some Hebrew poetry and prophecy. But Homer didn't. So we're not actually

tracing an influence between these two writers when they're composing. But both

traditions do influence the English epic, especially those of John Milton

and John Dryden.

So Homer's The Iliad. It's a war poem about rage.

It's about rage and war and mortality during the Trojan War. And it matters

because this is really the foundation of epic. It defines the heroic psychology

and emotion.

And you get a real tragic vision with this poem. It was one of the books that

Thoreau took with him to Walden. He was reading the original.

Greek. And I often think about that when I read Walden, because I think

Thoreau, like many other readers of Homer's The Iliad, saw in The Iliad a

picture of human life and struggle.

Homer's The Odyssey, which is his second great epic, is the story of homecoming.

It's the journey of Odysseus after the fall of Troy when he's going back home

to Ithaca. And it's important because it's the foundational story of wondering

and trying to find and recover identity.

It's also a story of longing for home.

If you've read Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, it's got a bit

of the Odyssey in there as well. James Joyce's Ulysses, which we'll talk about

soon.

also draws from this epic. So it is really foundational. You have to have

some awareness of it, and it's an absolutely beautiful read. I recommend

the Fitzgerald translation.

Now the other is Virgil's Aeneid, and this is also a journey of the hero

Aeneas from Troy.

He was one of the Trojans, and this follows the other side of the war from

the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome, and it matters as the epic of

destiny.

really, in national pride.

And now Virgil was, of course, very familiar with Homer.

So you do have some colloquy there, but you also have Virgil's Aeneid

influencing some of the Christian and medieval imagination in the literature

that we'll come to soon.

So these are three real cornerstones of the epic, but if you have time, you

might also read Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This is a different, it's a collection of stories, really.

transformative myths or myths of transformation from the creation of the

world to the age of Augustus. And it's important because it helped inform this

very mythic psychology central to storytelling.

So moving from the classics into the English medieval period, this period

includes Old English language and Middle English language across the 5th to 15th

centuries. In Old English, you have the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.

In the Middle English epic, if you can call it that, it's more allegorical. So

the Beowulf epic poem is truly an epic poem. Scholars wonder whether it was

influenced by Virgil. I think most of them don't believe so, but it's

certainly a North Germanic heroic epic.

Now, when you get into the medieval period that has the Middle English

language,

I'm going to interpret Epic very loosely as a long-form narrative story in verse.

So you have in the Middle English period the dream vision allegory of William

Langland and Piers Plowman.

And you also have a few long poems in the alliterative revival.

These really reach a culmination.

in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is a chivalric romance about

testing. It's one of the great test stories.

So it matters as one of the deep meditations on knightly virtue.

You have in this time the long epics of King Arthur, which was very important to

the medieval imagination.

But if you include William Langland's Piers Plowman as a sort of epic, an

allegorical dream vision, really, it's about...

spiritual truth, the search for truth, critique of powers that be,

so it's prophetic in that sense. It's very concerned with social justice and

reform for the church. This is right before the Reformation, too. You might

be thinking, oh, this sounds like the Reformation. It's not.

It's before.

You know, you do have certain proto-Reformation movements going on at

the time, and I think

are influencing this work.

But this really belongs to the domain of theology, social critique, and poetic

experiment, and that's what's so great about it. The next great epic is

Chaucer's Troilus and Crusade, which is a tragic love story set during the

Trojan War. Again, so it gives us a picture of the tragic interiority of

Troilus. There's this moment where he sees crusade walking in the temple and

then he goes back to his room and recreates it and he says those those can

he make a mirror of his mind a mirror in the mind so you begin to have this

psychological interiority being introduced into the storytelling around

this time by by chaucer now i would add in sir thomas mallory's lamorte to

arthur this is definitely an epic it's not in verse though and it's about the

legendary rise and fall of king arthur and the round table and it matters

because it really crystallizes this english myth a lot of english identity

during the reign of richard ii a little bit before drew from these stories so

this english myth is very important to the ideal of kingship and even cultural

collapse which leads us to the renaissance

The English Renaissance perfects the epic form, and it gets, I think, nearer

to the classical models, even though it departs from it in significant ways.

Take Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen, the moral, heroic, allegorical epic, or

John Milton's Paradise Lost as the English national epic, which consciously

rewrote biblical myth in classical form.

You can see how Satan is cast as a raging Achilles figure from the Homeric

epics.

Or even sometimes Satan becomes like Odysseus when he traverses chaos and

space. Or like Virgil's Aeneas, who's traversing land and sea in order to

conquest and to found something.

Satan is portrayed that way by John Milton in his Paradise Lost. So your

reading of the Hebrew Bible, especially of Genesis and Exodus, will be

indispensable here.

Another work is John Dryden's Absalom and Akitophel. So Absalom and Akitophel.

is a mini-epic that retells the Civil War during the reign of King David as an

attempt for the English attack to block King James II from succession.

So you need to know a little bit of history there, but just reading a

paragraph of an anthology introduction, I think, will bring you up to speed. You

don't have to, you know, study.

English history, but that will help. I'd say another one that's really important

is Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. It's not really an epic. It's a pastoral romance

that blends the epic, chivalric, pastoral, heroic modes from the

past. But it's a romance that mixes courtly politics and adventure with

philosophy, and it matters as a bridge between the medieval romance and the

psychological novel.

Now, I mentioned Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen.

And again, it's allegorical, but it's significant for many reasons.

But for the purposes of classifying as an epic, it really does fuse the

classical epic with the medieval romance model. So it's blending, well, it's

blending Homer's form of the epic with Sir Thomas Mallory's great

prose epic.

And it's also blending some of the Middle English dream vision and

allegorical work. So it's a beautiful amalgamation, which you really get a

sense of after having read some of that earlier work.

It's a great Protestant theological myth.

It's a great national myth as well.

And again, to go back to John Milton's Paradise Lost, the story of Satan's fall

and humanity's first disobedience is very important.

This is one of the most ambitious attempts to justify divine justice and

human freedom in English poetry.

And in that way, I think it's like the book of Job.

He has other epics too. John Milton's Paradise Regained is about the

temptation of Christ in the wilderness.

It's important because it does reimagine heroism as an inward victory. People

read that and they're very bored with it. Students sometimes don't get it.

I thought this was going to be grand, like Paradise Lost. Why is it just about

Jesus in the desert resisting Satan's temptations? That's kind of the point.

The point is that he internalizes kind of the grandeur into these moments of

the temptation.

The other epic by John Milton, I think we can call it an epic, is Samson

Agonistes. It's a dramatic poem about the blindness of Samson.

of divine mission it's a fusion of greek tragedy with biblical stories so if

you've read the book of judges that's going to help here because you're

already familiar with samson but you don't actually have to read the book of

judges to enjoy this poem on its own it's just filled with beautiful

beautiful music dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon

which of course comes up again and elliot and several other poets

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful poem. People should read that more.

Samson Agonistes, it's not taught that much anymore, but it's very good. It's

worth reading.

So let's move into the Restoration in the 18th century.

You'll hear me talk about the Restoration in the 18th century. The

Restoration refers to the Restoration of King Charles II.

There was 11 years of Puritan interregnum where England didn't have a

king, and this was after the Civil Wars.

But the king comes back, Richard II, the son of the king who was killed, comes

back and the monarchy is restored.

And that's in 1660.

So from that period on, it marks a turn in literature.

So the restoration in 18th century for the epic really turns toward the mock

epic.

So you have Alexander Pope's mock epic, the Rape of the Lock, the Dunsiad, the

Spirit of Gran narrative really persists there.

Dryden's Absalom and Akitophel belongs really to this period as a political

satire. I talked about it in the Renaissance and early modernist section,

but I think it kind of traverses that ground, as does John Milton.

Arguably, he belongs more in the Augustan or the Restoration period.

But it's difficult to separate these poets within their respective historical

contrived boxes.

And we return to Alexander Pope's Rape the Lock, which is a comic mock epic

about a stolen lock of hair, and it was based on a real event. The poem was sent

in jest to the family, and it's actually just amazing.

It perfects satire through the epic form, and also kind of pokes fun at the

elite culture.

Now, like Dunsiad...

Oh, if you're into the rap battles that have been going on, you know, maybe five

or ten years ago, that has its roots in the savage satire of the 18th century.

The Dunsiad is savage.

It's lambast, cultural stupidity and artistic decay.

And it's a wonderful poem. It's one of the sharpest cultural critiques in

English poetry that we have, in which Pope just lampoons so many writers.

some of them unfairly i think but uh it's it's fun that way so from the 18th

century we're going to move more into romanticism which really internalizes

the epic into a story of the self or cosmic myth and i think the important

ones here to mention are william blake's the four zoas and wordsworth's the

prelude so the four zoas this is prophetic symbolic rewriting of human

spiritual history and it's

It defies summary.

It's a very radical attempt to build personal mythos. I think that's what's

really interesting here about Blake and the epic.

We might include Walter Scott.

I think you could include The Lay of the Minstrel. It's a long narrative poem of

border legends and chivalric nostalgia.

So he's bringing back romance.

And it matters for reviving medieval romance.

within the Romantic nationalism.

It's actually where the word Romanticism gets its name. It's calling back to the

tales of the Romance languages, tales of King Arthur.

So it's kind of got that fantasy element to it. Another great epic is Lord

Byron's Child Herald's Pilgrimage.

It's a travel poem. It's a wondering meditation on disillusionment and the

self. And it matters for shaping modern restlessness. You get the wondering,

restless poet idea really canonized in this poem.

The individual and civilization lost amid dire straits and

terrible circumstances and melancholia.

But there's also William Wordsworth's The Prelude, a spiritual autobiography

of the growth of the poet's mind, and it turns the inner life as a subject of the

epic.

which is a radical thing to do. And if you've read John Milton's epic Paradise

Lost, then you have a good sense of the beauty of blank verse, which is unrhymed

lines of iambic pentameter. And that's what this poem is composed of. Now,

moving from the Romantics to the Victorians, you have large-scale

narrative poetry emerging at this time with Tennyson and Morris and Browning.

So Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idols of the King is a Victorian reimagining of King

Arthur. and his legends.

And it's more of a moral meditation on kingship, on leadership,

national identity, which is interesting that this is written during the time of

Queen Victoria.

We also get other long poems that I would argue are epic, such as Elizabeth

Barrett Browning's Le Roi Relais, which is inspired by Wordsworth's Prelude, and

this is sometimes referred to as a novel poem.

You can see how the epic and poetry

kind of blend at this point.

It's about a woman becoming an artist. And if you're a woman poet, read this.

It's canon.

It's a fusion of social realism, which is very characteristic of the novel

immersion at this time, and poetic vocation, which is a huge subject for

Wordsworth. I'll throw in William Morris's The Earthly Paradise. It's a

cycle of narrative poems drawn from myth.

Absolutely beautiful.

Enchanting. I was very young when I was reading it, and sometimes didn't

understand what I was reading. I couldn't understand the narrative, but

the language was just, it was spellcasting.

The imagery that swells up while you're reading these poems are cinematic

sometimes, and it matters for preserving romance and beauty against industrial

modernity. You see, from the romantics on, humanity is really struggling with

industry, technology, what will become, known as modernity. These are very

relevant for our times.

If you're an artist, a poet, a reader, or a student who's studying now in this

very technocratic age, you want to go back to these movements, these shifts in

literary history, where they're trying to understand what it means to be human

in an industrial age.

It's absolutely gorgeous descriptions in Morris.

So in American literature, we do have

Melville's Moby Dick, which is also a novel.

This metaphysical hunting voyage for the white whale.

It's also an interesting commentary on American obsessions.

I would classify that as an epic. And then you get this modernist reinvention

of the epic as a collage. You get Elliot's The Wasteland. You can read

that as an epic, even though it's not long enough to really qualify as an

epic.

But Ezra Pound's cantos, the proportions are epic, the subject matter is

classical, you could read it as an epic.

So, The Wasteland is a fragment, fragmentary vision of culture after

spiritual collapse, after World War I. There's a central poem of modernist

disillusionment. And then the cantos are vast, or the cantos is a vast

poetic collage of history and economics.

classical illusions.

I struggle enjoying the cantos, and I say that in full transparency because

you won't enjoy everything that you think you should read, but it is

important because it's probably the most radical attempt at the modern epic form.

I would add to that David Jones.

who, thanks to my friend Catherine, has introduced me to his epic poetry.

And I think he seems like somebody who should really be studied these days as

one of the post-World War I great epic poets writing in English, although he

was actually Welsh.

So that's epics.

Now, let's turn to lyric poetry.

Lyric is the most intimate genre, and one that speaks...

usually in a single human voice. So from Sappho and the Hebrew

psalmists to contemporary poetry.

It's the lyric tradition where literature thinks through feeling.

It is the form of passion.

It is the form of desire, of contemplation, of longing, of prayer.

And when you follow the lyric chronologically, you witness a

continuous experiment.

You can actually see the experiments unfolding, kind of crescendoing into one

another, in how the self expresses itself in words.

Classical love poetry, medieval devotion, renaissance wit and

metaphysical wit, romantic introspection, Victorian

musicality, and modernism's

fragmentation.

All of these you begin to see unfolding as the lyric pathway becomes a journey

into consciousness, because the lyric is really the mode of consciousness. It's

the mode of thinking aloud, as Helen Vindler writes in her great, very slim

volume, Poets' Thinking.

She says elsewhere in an interview that lyric poetry consists of enactments

of mobile consciousness.

So it's the consciousness moving aloud into music.

And it's the articulation of the private life of the soul.

The lyric is so important. And it's one of my favorite genres for this reason.

You'll see me teaching lyric poetry more than any other genre.

And here's how to read it, if you're new to this channel.

Slow down. Lyric poetry is seldom narrative.

It's usually a passionate utterance. You read it to hear it.

so small sections you should read repeatedly pay attention to the sound

observe punctuation with generous moments of silence the powers retain

perception it's seen through the eyes of another lyric poetry teaches you how to

notice and to hear your world will change after reading lyric poetry so

let's begin with the bible lyric poetry

in the Bible really begins with the Psalms. It's the core of the Bible. It's

the core of the English literary inheritance religiously. It's emotional

prayer. It's lament.

It's praise. It's crying out for social justice.

These are all the forms that underlie later English song.

To that, to the Psalms, I would also add the Song of Songs, which has become my

favorite. Now, I've read the Bible cover to cover.

Several times.

And the Song of Songs has become my favorite. It has become the most

consistently moving for me. So I'd start there.

Psalms and the Song of Songs.

And then you move into the classical lyric. And with the Greek and Latin.

lyricists. You find that they supplied the meters, the emotions, and the moods,

and the archetypes of personal expression, which would then be used in

later English poetry.

So Sappho's lyric fragments, they're very intimate, poems of love, a loss,

memory, prayer, even her great hymn to Aphrodite, she helped invent the

personal lyric voice.

Then you have Pindar's odes. These are these celebrations, an ode is a

celebration of something.

originally something to be danced to with three movements.

The Pindar Odes celebrate the athletic and the civil glory, usually

public themes. They matter for shaping the lyric as public ceremonial art so

that when you get to the 18th century, Pindar is important.

Now, another one you should read in Latin translations, if you don't know

Latin, is Cthulhu's poems, poems of love, rage.

grief, passion, with their psychological immediacy and tenderness.

There's something really accessible about the Latin lyric.

Horace's odes and epodes, philosophical and civic meditations, as they are on

time, on human life, they matter for defining the classical poetic composure

that's going to influence the English poets. Of the Renaissance and of the

Restoration in the 18th century, of Romanticism even, the Victorians. So

they are very important. They're going to be foundational.

Now, Old English Lyric brings elegy, particularly, into the tradition through

poems like The Wanderer and the Seafarer, where exile and spiritual

longing appear as very important themes. Elegy is a type of lyric poem that

commemorates or laments a certain topic, usually the death of a person.

So some great Old English elegies are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's

Lament, The Dream of the Rude is not an elegy, but it's one of the great poems

of the Old English period.

It actually gives us insight into the Anglo-Saxon vision of Christ as a

warrior who lays down his life like a beowulf hero for his tribe.

It's very strange. I think the Anglo-Saxons had a difficult time

wrapping their minds around a weak god, and so Christ to them really had to be

turned into a warrior.

You have the poems like the Battle of Malden, not really lyric poetry, it's

more narrative poetry, and the Battle of Brunnenberg.

These are, of course, less meditative and more narrative, but they do reveal

some of the poetic and courtly values of the time. Now, from Old English, we'll

move into Middle English lyric. And this deepens... It deepens...

into a religious devotion and courtly love. So there are the anonymous lyrics

of the Middle English, very many of them, in fact, which you should read,

and you can find them in any of the Old English or Middle English anthologies.

There's also William Dunbar's lyrics.

These are the late medieval poems by the Scottish poet, and they range from

religious vision to social satire. They are different.

And they are difficult, to me at least, but they're some of the most technically

brilliant and psychologically vivid lyrics.

Now, from there, we move into the Renaissance and the early modern period,

where the lyric opens up into this golden age of the lyric. And it's really

ushered in by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Surrey.

including some of the sonneteers, Sidney, Spencer, Shakespeare, of course,

and many others. This is also the period of the great metaphysical poets, or the

metaphysical style, Dunn, Herbert, Marvel.

And these poets really redefined lyric intelligence.

They're so cunning.

One critic described reading Dunn's poetry as playing chess with him. He's

constantly a few moves ahead of you.

And also, it's a time of lyrical intimacy.

So this is a huge list I'm about to give you, but I'm going to break it down into

what is often considered the most important poets.

So, if you only have six weeks and you want to read a lot of lyric poetry,

Here's what you should focus on. Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry.

Shakespeare's sonnets. Read them from the beginning to the end.

Read some of your favorite ones repeatedly.

Read the love poetry and the religious poetry of John Donne.

Read George Herbert's The Temple.

Read the beautiful poetry of Henry Vaughan from Silex Sintelans.

Read Thomas Trehearne.

an amazingly brilliant ecstatic poet.

He's the poet of ecstasy, I would call him, if Hopkins doesn't already deserve

that title.

Andrew Marvel.

These poets I've just listed are your bread-and-butter poets, the best of the

best lyricists.

You can probably get through all of their verses in six weeks, but then if

you want to learn more, here's another layer of good poets from this period.

The Earl of Surrey.

He introduces blank verse, which is iambic line.

lines without rhymes.

Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet sequence you'll want to read

Spencer's Amoretti sonnets.

Samuel Daniel's sonnets are very good, as are Michael Drayton's. These are some

of the great sonneteers that were writing before and around Shakespeare's

sonnets, so they're going to be good to read because they give you an insight

into how important the sonnet was and how very innovating and exciting and

very enterprising.

form. And you'll see that poets are using them in different ways and pushing

the boundaries of form.

Some of them are very emotionally moving, particularly Michael Drayton's,

and they're often very funny. Now, if you're still hungry for more poets from

this time, here's another small list. There's John Skelton. He's not great,

but he's a bridge between the medieval Tudor lyric and the Renaissance lyric.

There's Robert Southwell, our subtle.

And he was a Roman Catholic in a time when it was basically illegal to be a

Roman Catholic priest, which he was. There's the lyric poetry of Ben Johnson,

which is really good.

Robert Herrick, of course, has some really great lyrics in his Noble Numbers

and Hesperides.

Thomas Carey, Sir John Suckling, Richard Loveless, Richard

Creshaw. And Abraham Cowley, who was one of the great, he was one of the major

poets of the period, not much taught anymore.

To this list, I would also add Thomas Campion.

All excellent metricists and innovators.

Oh, and Edmund Waller.

Funny story about Edmund Waller. He had been a royalist conspirator during the

English Civil War, but was spared execution and he went into exile.

And he was later permitted to return to England, and he wrote a panegyric to

Oliver Cromwell. Now, a panegyric was a poem of praise, and this was written in

1655. Now, upon the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Edmund Waller

quickly produced a panegyric to King Charles II.

And when Charles II returned to the throne and read the poem, he commented

upon Waller's poem. He said that the poem for Cromwell was actually better

than the one you had written for me. And Waller said, sir, we poets never succeed

so well in writing truth as in fiction, which is one of the great replies in

the history of literary anecdotes.

His poem to read is probably Go Lovely Rose, but he has other beautiful lyrics.

And if you are absolutely insatiable and you want another set of lists from the

poets of this period, read George Gascony. Funny, witty, moving.

George Chapman's Homer, which Keats writes about.

You could read Arthur Golding's Ovid, and you could feed

two birds with one scone.

by reading Arthur Golding's Ovid, to mark off the epic list, Ovid,

Ovid, and also read the translation that Shakespeare was familiar with. This is

actually the translation that he knew.

There are also several good broadside ballads, and there's the poetry of Falk

Gravel. Not very well known today, but, you know.

there's a list for you. And more anthologies of the Renaissance and early

modern period will give you a good sampling of that.

Next, let's move to the Restoration in the 18th century.

This is when the lyric becomes polished and neoclassical. In fact, poetry

becomes much more public during this time, which means that the lyric poem is

not a popular genre during the Not a popular form, I should say. I'm calling

them genres, but they're really forms.

When it comes to the lyric poem. It's not a popular form because it's one

about personal emotion.

And this is not a popular topic after the Restoration.

People have had enough of emotion and of passion and of excitement after the

Civil War.

That will do it to you. And for this reason, the sonnet disappears until

Charlotte Smith and others in the Romantic period revive it.

But yet, the lyric lives on. And you could ask at this point in your reading,

how does wit become moral?

Why does reason often turn into satire during this period instead of just

argumentation?

The lyric poetry you should read here.

John Milton's sonnets and elegies are just superlative. You've studied the

Renaissance sonnet at this point, perhaps.

You'll easily begin to see how Milton puts his own spin on the sonnet, and he

introduces it as a form for politics, not just love poetry.

And he made the lines in jam, which means some of the lines don't have

punctuation at the end. This is an innovation. He does that a lot. And he

moves the volta, or the turn.

in the poem you'll know what i mean when you read some past sonnets you come to

john milden all of this you'll be able to see once you take this kind of

chronological reading now john dryden's poems and fables are a collection of

narrative poems and adaptations from classical and medieval sources not many

lyric poetry if they are lyrical but he really did perfect um the english poetic

voice that balanced clarity.

He was the great predecessor to Alexander Pope who would practically

perfect English poetry.

Another poet who's not quite a lyric poet, but has beautiful lyrical long

poetry, that's James Thompson.

You'll want to read his Seasons, which was an absolute hit in the 18th century.

It's long, descriptive poems celebrating nature through the changing year. And it

helped create the language of natural feeling that Romanticism would inherit.

Coleridge and Southey and John Clare.

loved his work. So you'll want to read Thompson.

Another poet, The Restoration, Bernard Mandeville, he writes a satirical poem

and prose work, several prose works that argue that private vice produced public

benefits. It was pretty scandalizing, as you can imagine, as a form of moral

philosophy, but it did anticipate modern economic and psychological thinking.

So in that respect, he was ahead of his time.

On that note of scandalousness. There's the second Earl of Rochester, John

Wilmot, and he was a libertine poet of biting wit.

He was very, he had, how should I say, he had sexual candor

and a bit of cynicism.

He matters because he exposed the hypocrisy beneath the restoration court

and respectability. He had very ruthless precision.

It's so bawdy at times. I wonder how he got away with it.

He's also a kind of predecessor to Lord Byron.

I'll probably be skewered in the comment section for that, but I think that holds

up. Another poet who was popular during this time, but is no longer really read,

but should be, is Edward Young.

His long poem, which is not quite lyric poetry, but it's lyrical, was titled

Night Thoughts. It's a very long meditative poem.

It's not really a graveyard poem, but it was very interested in mortality and

death, and it did help further what's been called the 18th century graveyard

tradition. And it did shape romantic melancholia.

So that's one of the reasons why it's important. But in its own right, outside

of a literary historical perspective, it's a great poem.

Another poet who actually did write proper...

Lyric poetry with Samuel Johnson. His lyric poetry is very controlled. It's

very moving. And if you've read the classical poetry of Horace, his odes

especially,

you'll be attuned to see that Johnson actually takes in a lot of the

Horatian style, especially in the poem On the Death of Dr. Robert Levitt.

Beautiful, beautiful poem. Another elegy actually commemorating the death of this

great author.

this great doctor.

And his verse was concerned with human vanity, with practical virtue. He was

interested in morality, like a lot of people in the 18th century. It's called

the Augustan Age for good reason. But Johnson embodied the ethical seriousness

of the 18th century. And he's probably the greatest writer of the 18th century.

Now, as far as poets, one of the greatest poets is Thomas Gray.

He spent years writing the poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and

it's one of his best.

It's a meditation on obscurity, on what it means to live a life outside of the

public eye.

He thinks about death.

He thinks about humble lives.

It is one of the most emotionally refined and universally recognized poems

in English.

In fact, nearly everyone had that poem by heart in its heyday. Now, Gray's

friend, William Collins,

write some beautiful odes so we turn back to the odes and see how the 18th

century was reinventing the penderic odes into a more meditative form and

collins's odes are wonderful he has several imaginative symbolic poems

exploring inspiration and melancholy and he i would say he along with gray and

several others like thompson are transitional figures between the

augustine neoclassical restraint and correction

and the Romantic period.

So these are what used to be called pre-Romantics. People don't talk that

way anymore.

It's not really a word used by scholars.

But for our chronological purposes, I think this term works perfectly well for

Gray and Collins, as it does for William Cooper.

William Cooper, I would say, read his only hymns. These are the hymns that he

wrote with John Newton.

John Newton is the Anglican minister who...

who wrote Amazing Grace, the great famous hymn.

Cooper was a friend of his, and he wrote several of his own good hymns that are

still sung in many churches today.

We should also read his blank verse poem, The Task.

It's reflective and meditative.

He brought inwardness and moral sensitivity into everyday subjects, and

that's exactly what the Romantics will do, so he's really paving the way.

Another poet, and he does belong in the Romantic category, but he's also in the

18th century.

is Robert Burns.

Now, and again, we are leaning into the Romantic era here. He is a Scottish

poet, writes of common life, of love, of religious critique and religious

feeling, and also of politics.

So he's very important because he unified vernacular language, that's

language of everyday life, with this very genuine lyric power.

In addition to Burns, you should also read Charlotte Smith.

She almost single-handedly revived the sonnet form, so you must read her

sonnets. Wordsworth was inspired by her. Wordsworth read her.

She's a novelist and a poet of melancholy, of ruins, of ruined

landscapes, very much anticipating Wordsworth, and emotional isolation.

She herself was very isolated in life. She did help invent the emotional

landscape of romantic poetry.

So let's turn to romanticism, which really explosively reinvents everything

that came before it. We got Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Blake, who

make the lyric become the central vehicle of spiritual and emotional

insight.

William Blake. Start with Blake, if you dare.

He is the wild visionary poet of London. I'll be teaching a course on Blake in

January of next year. That's 2026.

He is an anomaly.

He's like no one you've read before.

Unless you've read the Hebrew prophets, which you should have. So you've read

Daniel. If you've read Isaiah, if you know who Isaiah is, you're golden to

read Blake.

He is the prophetic visionary.

He is...

I think he's the English Ezekiel. If you've read these Hebrew prophets, you

know exactly what I mean.

But read a bit of Hebrew prophecy when you turn to Blake, and you'll see how

prophetic he really is.

Now, William Wordsworth, my favorite poet, dear Wordsworth, one of the six

greatest poets in the English language, he's inspired by Milton's verse, his

epic, lofty, gorgeous, natural, inspired, what more could you want?

Read everything of Wordsworth.

Read the lyrical ballads. Read the Prelude. Start with those two.

And then you can read more.

Next, you should turn to his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He's the poet of the imagination, of mystery, of dreams, of psychological

depth. He's the one who wrote Kublai Khan, which you might have heard before.

Coleridge, when he was a poet, because he wasn't always a poet, he pushes the

boundaries between a dream and reality.

He helped invent the concept of romantic symbolism, and he gave English

poetry its deepest theory of the imagination, which is found in his

Biographia Literaria, chapter 13.

So read that. We will be studying that this year on my teaching platform first.

But Lord Byron is the poetry of precision.

He's so precise.

Probably the most correct poet.

of the 19th century, maybe since Pope. He's the poet of rebellion as well, of

exile, of the broody romantic type we all like to think about, and that, of

course, inspired some of the Brontë sisters.

But he has this consciousness.

He turned his own persona into a literary form.

He's one of the first people to do that. In fact, he's one of the first

celebrities. I'm not counting Goethe.

He reimagined the modern figure of the defiant.

sexy, charismatic outsider.

And this, of course, you can see all throughout the 19th and 20th century,

all the way up into our own day with some depictions of that type in

Hollywood. Next, you should read Percy Bysshe Shelley. He's the visionary poet

of political idealism.

He's also spiritual, even though he's often called an atheist. An atheist

during that time was just somebody who didn't believe

really in the Christian God. He believed in a very imminent God, so he's a bit of

a pantheist. If you read his letters and his correspondences with Robert Southey,

you get a picture of this. He's a poet of radical hope.

Actually, he soars on the wings of poetry, and his verse is like a great

eagle that actually picks you up.

And you're soaring along with it on the heights. Once it gets to the very top of

some high valley, the eagle drops you, and that's where the poems release you,

kind of at the height of this poetic excitement.

And then you just kind of, you're left in that state a few minutes after you

read the poem. It's amazing.

Next is John Keats, the poet of the ear, the soft-conchered ear, the worshiper of

beauty and the worshiper of psyche.

His poetry just sings.

Take it off the shelf. Let it loose upon the air, and you'll find your heart

filled with the most intoxicating sounds and images.

Keats, Keats is amazing.

Keats is, in terms of sound, Superlative.

In terms of structure, Shelley is superlative. In terms of correctness,

Byron is superlative.

In terms of deep feeling and high philosophical thought, Wordsworth is

superlative. In terms of criticism, Hazlitt's superlative. He's not on this

list. In terms of imagination theory, Coleridge is superlative. In terms

of prophecy, William Blake is superlative. That should give you a...

An overview of the Romantics. So now let's turn to the Victorians. So the

Victorians refine the Romantics.

They're more psychologically intense and formally complex in their lyrics. You

have Tennyson and Browning and Rossetti and Hopkins.

All innovators in their own way.

But here's the list of the top six, I would say. If you want to focus on six,

focus on Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Careful and daring at the same time, his lyric poetry gave the Victorian era its

most dignified and musical expression of modern spiritual uncertainty.

Any of his anthology pieces are good.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poet of love and devotion, her sonnets from the

Portuguese are evergreen. Robert Browning, a poet of dramatic monologue,

who exposes the twisted logic and secret motives of the human soul. He's very

much like Shakespeare in this way.

I mean, he's really good with the monologue. And he matters because he

turned poetry into a kind of experimenting grounds, a laboratory of

psychology. And he's a big poet of the modernist era. If you read Eliot's

works, T.S. Eliot's, of the modernist period, you'll see how he actually is

drawing a lot from what Robert Browning brought to the English tradition.

Next is Gerard Manley Hawkins. Beautiful.

beautiful poetry electric ecstatic hopkins um he has a range although you

wouldn't know it from the anthologies he has dark sonnets which are well darker

than his more popular pieces but he's also a really great experimenter in

verse and he gave something truly new and truly important to the english

tradition now another poet is christina rose and she's a bit of an aesthetic

poet of renunciation, I think. At least that's how I've been thinking of her

with the poetry I've been reading. She's written a lot of poetry. There's a great

Penguin edition of her work that's quite thick.

But she gave a very spiritual struggle.

She gave poetry of spiritual struggle. She has this emotional purity and

intensity. Her later life sonnets are good on this. Her Goblin Market is

probably the most famous. It's also good.

She was one of the great Anglo-Catholic poets.

Next is Algernon Swinburne.

And he is a very decadent poet of sensuality and rebellion against moral

constraint. And his poems are delicious in the way that Keats' poems are

delicious. But they aren't as... They lack a certain... Hmm.

restraint, we could say. A decadence is a good word for Swinburne. He pushed the

English lyric toward musical extremity and modern asceticism. Okay, if you've

read that and you want more, there is more.

There's Matthew Arnold, who is a poet and cultural critic obsessed with the

loss of shared meaning in the secular age after Darwin. He's kind of a

curmudgeon, but in a lovable or respectable sort of way, despite the

whiskers. He...

He framed the Victorian crisis of faith in terms that shaped cultural criticism

for decades, and he actually lays the plan for the professional studies of

English literature with his vision of humanism and this idea of literature as

a secular scripture.

I think the famous example of his lyric poetry wrestling with this is Dover

Beach.

There's also Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

the brother of Christina Rossetti, one of the great Victorian poets, one of the

great poets of Victorian medievalism. There's a whole hype of medieval

literature in the Victorian period, and he was one of those poets.

He's a poet of medieval longing and beauty.

He's got something of an erotic mysticism clinging about his verse, and

he helped make pre-Raphaelite art and poetry what it was.

William Morris was a friend of his. Another good poet is George Meredith.

And we drop fruits like the tree.

Even we, even so, he says in one of his poems.

He's a good poet. He's mostly known for his novels. It's a bit underrated.

Thomas Hardy is kind of in the same vein here. But someone needs to bring him

back. And I mentioned Thomas Hardy. I'll throw him on the list too. His poetry

was inspired by his native Dorset.

It's tender.

It's never bleak, but he can be a bit fatalistic in a very beautiful and

tragic, melancholic way, but he's very important as a novelist.

Another poet I'd throw on this list is George MacDonald.

He's another novelist and one of the mystics, and I think his Diary of an Old

Soul works as a good companion to the Christian calendar.

So that's the Victorians. Let's go back to American poetry now.

American poetry takes a while to invent itself because the anxiety of influence

was real for the Americans.

Until the Revolution, they had been perfectly fine adopting the British

standards for poetry.

But after the Revolution, after the Revolutionary War, that was a bit

awkward. So in the early periods, you have the poets who were very religiously

minded and classically trained in the way that most poets of the 17th century

were, and Bradstreet.

Really great American Puritan poet writing devotional and domestic verse in

colonial New England. She established the first serious interior poetic voice

that uses American landscape in its imagery.

So she's new for that.

There's another Puritan minister, Edward Taylor, and he belongs with Herbert and

Crashaw and Dunn.

His work is often described as metaphysical. He remained unpublished

during his lifetime, but one of the great...

Puritan poets who was really popular during his time was Michael

Wigglesworth. And this is the poet of doom.

He's the author of The Day of Doom, which is a very long, terrifying vision

of judgment.

He's important because he... I think he's more important because of the

rhetoric of his poetry than for the verse of his poetry. In my opinion,

simply because he reveals the psychological power of Puritan rhetoric

and eschatology in early America.

His verses, you know, it's okay.

He's kind of like John Bunyan, if you've read his versified books of the Bible,

which I would not recommend as poetry.

It's kind of like that, which was a very popular genre, but not really studied or

respected in the study of English literature.

Philip Frenot.

American poetry gets more secularized with Frenot. He is patriotic. He's

nature-oriented, like some of the poets before him.

He's a poet of the revolutionary era, and he helped move American poetry from

theological to political and natural themes.

So he has a lot of poetry lauding America.

And most of it's good. It's the type of poetry called a panegyric. Now, another

American poet is William Cullen Bryant.

He's a poet of death.

of nature like many 18th century poets of grave serenity a very

early romantic feeling and he gave american nature poetry a very classical

dignity and a very moral calmness he's very composed then we get ralph waldo

emerson his lyric poetry is not bad it's not totally great either he helped

provide an american philosophical foundation for the poets who become

after him

Henry David Thoreau, he actually did write poetry, lyric poetry, as a few

poems, although he's more known for Walden, and rightly so.

And then we have Edgar Allan Poe, a poet of haunted consciousness, and definitely

not friends with the guys up north.

Emerson and Thoreau, whom he called the Frogpondians, were not friends with Poe

either. To be fair, Emerson did call... Poe, the jingle man.

So I think he did deserve the Frog Pondian comment.

But Poe's lyrics have a very dark psychological intensity. That's what

he's known for.

This is not new.

And you think, well, where did this come from?

Well, it's coming from the Gothic literature over in England in the 18th

century, yes, but it's also coming from Puritan eschatology.

If you remember Wigglesworth, he had this very dark poetry too.

Although Poe's poetry is not religious.

Now the next poet is Herman Melville, who turned to poetry after the failure

of his novel Moby Dick.

But he's actually a really good poet. We studied his poetry, his collection

Battle Pieces, on Versed not too long ago. It was last year. And we found it

really moving and tragic and quieting in a way.

So I'd read his poetry. He's a good poet, although he's a better novelist.

Probably the great poet Walt Whitman. Like Blake, Whitman is drunk on the

Hebrew prophets.

He's one of the greatest innovators of American verse.

Really represents the expansiveness of American identity.

Now, if he's the poet of expansion, Emily Dickinson is the great poet of

concision. She's the great American poet of inwardness, of composure, of

compression. She is the other great American poet, and she created the most

radical, minimalist lyric.

in the English language.

Now, the English-speaking modernist poets bring a new development to

literature, so let's move into the modernist period.

We'll start with a handful. So the first group is the high modernist architects.

These are the great movers and shakers of modernist poetry.

You have William Butler Yeats, you have Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,

William Carlos Williams in H.D., Hilda Doolittle,

You have Marion Moore, Basil Bunting.

If you want to begin with the most important poets, that's your start.

They're difficult, but they're rewarding. They reshaped the

intellectual and formal framework of moral poetry.

So start with them. Then next comes a list of some of the war poets, many of

whom suffered under the trench warfare during World War I. They suffered a

spiritual and psychological disillusionment.

Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, although he's more than just a war poet,

he also writes great meditative poetry.

Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, David Jones.

These are very good poets.

Romanticism silenced the panegyric poem, the great political praise poem, but the

war poets killed it. They changed the patriotic lyric into a poetry of...

protest, really, and many of them who survived the war went on to write even

more innovative poetry.

So from the war poets, you may move on to the decadents, kind of the last

hangers-on of the Romantic movement.

Ernest Dowson, Walter Delamere, he's a very good one, John Maysfield, whose

poetry is okay, Hilaire Bellick, Edward Muir.

I should probably not give so much of my own judgments here.

to color your own.

They're all good poets. They're musical. They're sometimes mystical.

Delamere is definitely mystical and enchanting in many ways. But they

carried into the modernist movement the Victorian asceticism that we had with

Swinburne and Tennyson and, to some degree, Morris.

They're also drawing from the Romantic period.

So, if you still want more, here's a whole section on the American modernist

poets, all together. This is the American list.

that these poets wrote with a very distinctly American idiom.

Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg, he's more into post-modernism,

he comes a little later, but he's good.

Robin Jeffers, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes,

Archibald MacLeish. And you can look to these poets to see how they made

regional voices a part of American poetry.

where Whitman was very unifying and universal at times, these modernists,

these Americans, were particular and local in their expression.

Their poetry gave American modernism its own distinctive flavor.

Now, another minor grouping. You have the metaphysical intellectual moderns

with Conrad Aiken, John Ransom, and Alan Tate. Their poetry asks...

can a poem can a lyric poem bear the weight of philosophy they were all

associated with a new critical school of close readers so they're very interested

in the metaphysical poets this tautness this very philosophical formal

complication and then we have the experimental and radical individualists

whom i'll name here e.e cummings christopher murray grieve you could also

throw in gertrude stein's tender buttons if you dare, but that book of poetry is

largely incomprehensible to me.

Although I'd be curious if other people know what exactly it's trying to do,

because I would be grateful for that. I'm not a big fan of Gertrude Stein's

Tinder buttons, but I think she was up to something, and perhaps I'm just not

smart enough to really understand what she was doing or to appreciate it. But I

leave that to you. Maybe you can. I'd be curious, if you can, tell me more about

that. in the comments if you love tinder buttons why please enlighten me um so

now let's move to drama drama is literature made visual and this form is

necessarily an embodied art form it's very ancient and possibly one of the

first primal expressions of art that has its origins in ritual and in

in our list it begins with the classical theater and then it grows into one of

the more defining arts of the renaissance with shakespeare and his

contemporaries who really expand the possibilities of dramatic language so by

tracing a drama from biblical and classical roots mostly classical through

the medieval cycles and the explosive creativity of the renaissance moment

and up to the moral and satirical wit of the 18th century, all the way up to the

experiments of modern theater, which was another great revival of drama, you're

going to see how each era uses this form, reinvents it, to consider the

conflicts of what it means to be an individual within a society.

How do you act under these circumstances of civilization?

Now, when you're reading a drama, it's going to be very different. I would say

I would recommend watching them if you can.

Either go to the productions or watch recordings.

But as you're reading, this is tough because it's a visual form. Always try

to imagine the bodies in space.

Drama is literature that assumes breath.

It relies upon gesture and timing.

So notice the entrances, the exits.

Think about the different dynamics of body language when you're reading.

Notice when language becomes action through the script.

Character in drama is revealed by action.

It's revealed also by word. But you are watching the will of spirit in action

when you're watching a drama. So you begin with the classical blueprint.

which really the classical authors became the blueprint for the English

theater during the Renaissance and later.

Aeschylus' Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, like Ulysses

from Homer, except he returns to a wife who murders him for having sacrificed

their daughter Clytemnestra in So you get this very bloody revenge

drama. And this is one of those classical plays that inform the English

revenge drama of the Elizabethan era. There's also Aeschylus' Prometheus

Bound, which was an important play for the Romantic poets, particularly the

later Romantic poets.

Prometheus is this figure. He's punished by Zeus for giving fire to humankind.

And this play is the template for the tragic rebel type.

Sophocles' Antigone is a really important work to philosophy and

literature of many later periods.

Antigone defies King Creon by burying her brother in accordance with divine

law, which is actually in transgression of Creon's law, or his decree.

And this sets up this model between conscience, the internal law, and state

power, external law.

Really great play. Next is Oedipus Rex.

It's, of course, hugely important to later psychological theories and to

theories of tragedy, but it really defined tragic irony.

There are the plays of Euripides.

His Alcestis, his Medea, the Trojan Women. These are plays about women, and

they're all important dramas that deal with what it means to be a woman,

individual.

within a larger state of crisis or under divine law and most of these place by

the way you can read in an afternoon just pick an afternoon and maybe read

two of them or are only one so you don't get them confused in your memory but

they're very accessible in that way aristophanes arcanians is also a good

play. It's about a citizen who makes a pact to escape the Peloponnesian War

while all of the Athenians remain at war. So it's a bit comic.

But it's a particular model for political satire that will be used in

future years.

So moving from the classical, you go into the medieval period.

And this is where you get something more aligned with the Bible. So I've skipped

over the Bible in this section because there are no proper dramas, of course.

in the bible but the english medieval drama owes much of its much of its art

to the bible more than it does classical uh plays it owes

more to church rituals and bible stories than to sophocles or the others and it

generally falls under two main categories you have the mystery plays

sometimes called the miracle plays which is about biblical stories saints lives

and then you have the morality plays which tend to be more allegorical it's

about the struggles between virtue and vice and what it means to be a good

person particularly what it means to act well in society so some of the greatest

mystery cycles are the york mystery cycles you can pick the plays the ones

that are most famous the creation and fall of the angels you have noah you

have the second shepherd's play which is very funny and then the last judgment

you have several others too the york cycle gets the most attention but you

could also check out the chester mystery plays and the wakefield mystery plays

they're also worth taking a look at now the morality play was a religious but

usually wasn't inspired by the Bible. They depicted the common life.

And the most famous of these was the Everyman play, which follows the

allegorical representative of us all, the Everyman, through trials up until

his death, to his judgment.

Now, this is under the medieval category, but it's really more of a

Tudor drama. It's a very late medieval drama. And this leads us to the

Renaissance, which is really the center of gravity for English drama.

You've got Marlowe.

Shakespeare, Johnson, Lilly, Webster, Ford, who all create the enduring

corpus, dramatic corpus, of English drama.

So there's, of course, Shakespeare. Read everything of Shakespeare.

Read it all.

Unless you're like me and you're saving one play for old age.

Then turn to Marlowe.

You might start with his Dr.

Faustus. This is a play that introduces the modern tragic figure of the

intellectual.

overreaching it's also about spiritual despair which was a huge anxiety during

this time so when you're reading that you're really tapping into not just the

literature but also the culture surrounding it tamburlaine is another

great play that's often assigned in english departments has more to do with

the rising of a shepherd through ambition and charisma

And it's a meditation on ambition and political power. Of Marlow, you have

also The Jew of Malta, which is another good play that challenges religious

hypocrisy. So you'll often see... in Marlow, glimpses of the political and

religious critique, and it gives you a sense of how dynamic this form is used

as a way to challenge existing structures to critique society and

religion in various ways, especially during a time when some forms of English

Calvinism were very hostile to the stage.

There's also Thomas Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy, which is a wild ride.

and this is this is clearly set in a it's a very revenge tragedy this is the

pattern that hamlet will later be based on you have john webster's the judges of

malfi which is a bloody play that pushes to its limits the the genre

of renaissance tragedy next you have ben johnson who's probably next to

shakespeare the most important playwright of this time and he's firmly

fixed in the canon you have bartholomew fair which is carnivalesque. It's a

panoramic comedy of social types and moral blindness. It pokes fun at the

Puritans, the English Calvinists, in interesting ways.

Volponi is also a really good play of Johnson, I think you should read, as is

The Alchemist, partly inspired by John Dee, the magician.

You have, of Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy. They were popular

playwrights at the time.

John Keats really enjoyed Beaumont and Fletcher, so if you love Keats, you

might go back and read some of their plays.

Of Thomas Middleton, who's another big dramatist of this time, you should read

The Changeling, another play about spiritual corruption, which was

something that many people were concerned, if not obsessed about, at the

time. So then you move into the Restoration period and the 18th century.

In this period, drama becomes witty, very polished, very classical, socially

incisive. You have figures like Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith.

You have also a very sentimental drama emerging at this time in an early

bourgeois theater rising.

And I had to consult with some of my friends who work in this area.

Restoration drama is not within my interests, although I'm trying to...

fix that and i really need to do more reading in this area but for what i have

for you is mostly based on their recommendation some of my reading and

what i've been able to find in anthologies so first off sir william

davenant's love and humor this is a good bridge from the renaissance stage to the

restoration stage it contains some shakespearean elements but it also has

the wit that would characterize the new era of drama the line of influence here

actually doesn't come from shakespeare in the restoration period the big name

here is ben johnson next we have john dryden he wrote very many plays the

conquest of granada is really bolsters the restoration heroic drama through

this use of of rhetoric and excellent speeches.

Marriage a la mode is a funny, popular play by John Dryden. It's about mistaken

identities, very much Shakespearean in that way, intertwined with a very

serious plot.

So you notice you'll have, in some of these, the high and the low mingled

together. This is something that drama really does well and something that

Shakespeare really perfected, so you can still see his legacy there.

Although during the Restoration in the 18th century,

The playwrights didn't really look to Shakespeare as an example. Most of them

considered him to be an eccentric aberration. So you get a good sense of

the flexibility of the restoration drama with Dryden. Moving along in time, you

have William Wycherley's The Country Wife, a good example of funny social

satire. William Congreve's Love for Love is a very structurally neat and tight

play. It has almost a perfect narrative architecture, and it...

It contains this elegance that represents the ideal of restoration

comedy. If you want to get an insight as to what they thought was the perfect

comedy, really representative, I would go with Witcherly. You should read Sir

Joseph Addison's Cato, another one that I've read, and it's about the Republican

Cato resisting Julius Caesar's tyranny and his final stand for liberty.

This is important for many reasons. It's a good play.

Addison is a wonderful writer. He's a better essayist, I think. But it shaped

Enlightenment ideals of civic virtue and in a way also reflected those emerging

ideals. Next, you have John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, one you definitely

should read. It's a satirical ballad opera that depicts thieves and criminals

as mirrors of corrupt politicians.

So it basically invents musical...

political satire and lays the groundwork for modern musical theater so if you

love musicals you should you should read this this play this is kind of the grand

grandfather of the musical oliver goldsmith's she stoops to conquer by

this point in the 18th century shakespeare is making a comeback And

this romantic farce is driven by confusion, again, mistaken identities,

another Shakespearean theme, and it revives the high Shakespearean comic

spirit against the overly sentimental theater that was emerging at the time.

You have Sheridan's The Critic. So if you're interested in literary criticism

of the 18th century, which can be fun, I would, I would, you'll...

You're primed to really enjoy this one. It works as a nice inside joke to those

of you who may be familiar with the ins and outs of restoration theater. Some of

Dryden's essays would help here.

So it's a farce. So it mocks the vanity of playwrights and over-the-top

theatrical productions.

In this way, it's very meta-theatrical. Who else? Because you should go to Henry

Fielding's plays.

The Life and Death of Tom Thumb is a big one. But if you're going to read

Fielding, you should read the novels. And I'll mention him later in the novel

section. So from the 18th century, then you move into the romantic drama. And

here, drama.

kind of falls off.

This is really the age of the novel and of lyric poetry.

Romantic drama is symbolically uneven, I think. Now, the late scholar Fred

Berwick dedicated much of his scholarship to romantic drama, which

remains overshadowed by the lyric poetry.

And I remember him saying to us graduate students some years ago, he said, try to

change this, try to really bring romantic drama back.

So I never did, but if there are any graduate students looking for a topic of

scholarship that needs to be expanded, romantic drama is one of them. I am for

good reason, I think.

Some of the drama is really good from a particular angle.

There's Coleridge's Osorio. It's Wordsworth's The Borderers. Yes, they

wrote drama.

A lot of people are surprised by this.

There's Hill and Beto's Death's Jest Book, which was...

a comedy. It was funny. And then you have some more melancholic, dramatic

seriousness with Lord Byron's Manfred, which, to be honest, is the only

romantic drama that I liked. And it was often called the closet drama or mental

theater. It wasn't meant to be performed. It's meant to be read. So of

the romantics, I think Byron was the better playwright.

For not following Shakespeare and for taking instead the classical and

Miltonic models for his dialogues, Percy Bysshe Shelley was also very popular.

What's important of his?

If you've read Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, then you're set up to read

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Chinchi.

which was his most popular play during the time.

But for the average reader, focus your dramatic reading on the 17th and 18th

centuries. This is where it's most important to literary history, I think.

But of course, in all things, follow your own taste.

Let your own desires be your guide here. Now we move into the Victorian theater,

which diversifies the dramatic tradition a bit.

But the Victorian period is really the age of the novel predominantly.

But you'll want to read

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, it's witty, it's hilarious, and

possibly Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. But again, this really isn't

the age of the drama.

The major innovations in this field arrive with modernism, and I've grouped

these into three separate categories.

So now we're moving into the modernist drama.

First you have the modern poetic and ritual drama, where the form is

really... going back to its roots, its ritual roots.

So William Butler Yeats' drama, At the Hawk's Well, you should read also of his

The Death of Cucullin, or The Death of Cucullin.

These are also important here because Yeats' symbolism made the stage much

more interesting. And of course, he was an important figure for the revival of

Irish arts.

Next is Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

It's interesting because it brings back the poetic drama to the stage.

It's got what Matthew Arnold might call high seriousness.

But you also have Dylan Thomas, who's a great lyric poet, mostly known for his

lyric poetry. But Under Milkwood is one of his dramas. And this is actually a

radio play.

So it's playing with the new forms of media.

And it follows the Welsh village over a single day and night.

And Dylan is wanting to bring back the poetic language to the modern drama. And

he does.

And this is what a lot of the modernists are doing as well.

Then you have a grouping of American psychological realism.

You've got Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which is always moving. It's about a

death in a small town. It's a very minimalist portrait.

of American life and the sacredness of ordinary life.

There's Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller's Death of a

Salesman. Then you have Samuel Beckett's Theater of the Absurd. So a whole other

category here. At least read Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

And you can watch at least one very good production of Endgame for free on

YouTube. Beckett, you have to see. It's really the spectacle of existential

despair. And then you have Metatheater and post-war, comedy of menace. You have

Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Here you have the post-war turn to

existentialism in Beckett and Pinter, and that's carried forward by Tom

Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, of course based on the

Shakespearean characters there. So that's the list I would give for

starters on drama.

Now let's turn to the novel. Well, the novel as the name would suggest, is the

newest of the genres, but it quickly became the most dominant narrative form

in the modern world.

So its origins come from the epic, it also comes from biblical storytelling,

ancient fiction, but its rise in the 18th century in the English tradition

marks a significant shift from

From high subjects to ordinary subjects. Because with the novel, you see that

ordinary lives then become the worthy subjects of art.

And the novel list I'm going to give you here offers a path through some of the

most respected novels of the English tradition.

How does one read a novel? You should let the world slowly build. Take in all

the details. A novel trains...

endurance of attention try to get through as much as you can without

having to put it down if your mind wanders through a paragraph don't worry

it happens to everyone go back and read it again Don't ever just keep going

because everything in a novel is very important. Don't just focus on the plot.

Focus on how time works in the novel, how narrative will shift from scene to

scene, how the memory builds in accumulation, and how, especially in the

modernist novel, how consciousness unfolds. You'll notice how description

of novels teach us how to see.

Novels train.

the moral imagination how to judge how to forgive how to endure and how to

better understand those whom we live with those with whom we live would be

technically more proper but let's not proto-novels already appear in the

biblical narratives of ruth esther in some respects the gospel of john which

does borrow from the literary motifs of the hellenistic novel you also have the

book of acts

in the new testament as well acts operates as a spiritualized epic of

travel shipwrecks trials escapades great speeches in community

formation it matters because it transforms the missionary movement or

the journey of the early church as this adventure narrative the writer of acts

certainly had he was whoever they were were well versed in

the novels of the time, the storytelling patterns of the ancient world. And these

are character-driven stories of development, of moral testing. And what

most readers miss is that the Bible is not one genre.

The Hebrew story of Ruth, the book of Ruth, reads like a tender lyric poem.

Actually, it is very lyric.

lyrical the book of esther reads as a political thriller and acts as i said

gives us this travel epic so if you've read homer's the odyssey you'll of

course be thinking of that during some of the some of paul's odysseys in the

book of acts so these forms of storytelling although we can't really

classify them as novels certainly informed the way the english wrote their

novels also informative are the novels of the classical world i think there are

two that are particularly important here. As examples of narrative fiction,

you have Longis' Daphnis and Chloe, which is really centered upon awakening

of consciousness. It helps establish the grammar of the Western romantic novel.

I mean, you've got everything.

You've got youth, naivete, erotic education, natural setting or the

pastoral world as the landscape in which all of this unfolds, and this gradual

self... knowledge.

So it's, in that sense, a proto-bildungsroman.

A bildungsroman is a type of novel that traces the moral or spiritual or

intellectual development of a character. This is the most famous type of novel

among the English novels.

But then there's Apuleius's The Golden Ass.

How do I describe this novel?

It's a comic, picaresque, spiritual romance novel, a quest story.

Robert Graves said that it contained the most accurate depiction of what he

called the White Goddess.

There's a whole book on that. So you'll find that the modern novel actually has

roots in the classical epic and novels as well. So we move into the Old English

and Middle English. You'll find a lack of the modern novel, but you can see

some of the elements preparing.

for the novel you have the anglo-saxon chronicles not novels but of course

narrative and informing sort of the narrative historical style that would

develop in the novel you have romances prose narratives i'm thinking of jeffrey

chaucer's the canterbury tales which is a story cycle in which pilgrims tell

tales to each other on their way to canterbury it's not exactly an epic it's

not exactly a novel i don't know where to put it in within these five

categories i'm i'm laying out here in this video but it does have some proto

-novelistic elements and it is foundational for english voice

social satire, all the things that the novel will then participate in with a

variety of literary forms.

And you can probably call John Gower's Confessio Amantis a novel, although it

is a 30,000-line poem.

But you can see even there the seeds of prose fiction. And you can see Gower's

influence in some of Shakespeare's romances. So the place to look for

influences upon novels really in the English tradition?

are the Arthurian romances of the French-speaking Chrétien des Trois and

the English prose writer Sir Thomas Malory, whose Le Morte d'Arthur is an

epic, but it's also a proto-novel.

So that's, I'd say, where you look for the roots of the modern novel in the

medieval period.

But then let's talk about the Renaissance.

The Renaissance has prose fiction.

which you could say are also proto-novelistic. Sir Thomas More's

Utopia is one of them. Good example of early sci-fi, actually. He's imagining

kind of this utopian world. There's also Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.

Thomas Nash's The Unfortunate Traveler, in which you can find a picaresque

continental influence in this tradition. It wasn't very popular, so don't put

that high on your reading list unless you're particularly interested.

But it's in the Restoration in the 18th century when the novel becomes a major

English genre, if not the genre.

You have great works like John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

If you've ever read this, you'll see.

that there is this extension of the creative allegory. So this is a

spiritual allegory told through a journey, and it gave English literature

its most enduring map of the soul's movement through life. You have this map

as well in Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen.

Pilgrim's Progress was also Samuel Johnson's.

favorite. It was one of his top three favorite books. There's also Gulliver's

Travels by Jonathan Swift.

This is a satirical travel narrative disguised as a novel. Now, the travel

narrative is also proto-novelistic, very popular in the 18th century, and it

turned the novel into kind of as a knife of philosophical and cultural critique.

Swift is amazingly skilled with this knife.

Aphra Benz, Orinoco.

This is an early abolitionist prose romance that contains a bit of

eyewitness accounts.

It has an element of realism.

It shows the novel as a device with which to confront corruption, the

empire, slavery particularly.

So before the modern novel became very domestic and very psychological and

interior, it was, you can see here with these examples, spiritual, political and

social, and also potentially dangerous.

And that's what the three previous novelists give us. Now moving through

the 18th century, great novelist Daniel Defoe really pushed forward a realistic

narrative with his Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

Samuel Richardson really develops the realistic style too through the

epistolary form.

He provides the psychological interior with his enormous volume Clarissa

and his shorter novel Pamela. I would start with Pamela, and if you really

like Richardson, then go on to Clarissa, which is sitting there in a four-volume

Everyman's edition that I have yet to read.

Fielding gives us the comic epic, and Henry Fielding, he's the one you'll

probably want to start with. Read Joseph Andrews. Read Tom Jones.

They're funny, if not at times laborious.

Tobias Smollett. Read his Roderick Random. I'm currently reading this one

myself, and it's also

a good companion to, I'm finding, Henry Fielding's novels.

There's Lawrence Stern, who's hilarious. He produces this extremely hilarious

account of this experimental, self-conscious novel with Tristam

Shandy. There is Frances Burney. She is a social novelist in many respects

similar to Jane Austen. In fact, she's one of her forerunners. So if you like

Jane Austen, you want to understand, whom was Jane Austen reading?

She was certainly reading

Francis Burney.

Francis Burney's Evelina is a coming-of-age novel. I would put that on

the list. It's also concerned with social manners in the same way that

Austen's is. And it's also an epistolary novel, meaning it's written in letters.

Now, when you get to Romanticism and the literature of the late 18th century,

more generally, you'll see the novel expands into the Gothic. It leans into

this proto-science fiction mode it's also a little bit more philosophical so

oliver goldsmith's the vicar of wakefield is a comic a very morally

earnest depiction of a rural family's trials and it's also really funny the

novel the backstory of this novel is that It was really published, sent to

the publishers by Samuel Johnson, who rescued Goldsmith from his creditors by

selling this manuscript to the publisher. So that's how that came to be

published. There's Horace Walpole's novel, The Castle Otranto.

This is really the grandfather of the English Gothic novel, foundational

Gothic novel in English literature, went on to inspire other stories, including

Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, who Radcliffe really refined the Gothic

formula. I'd say perfected it with the atmosphere that would be so crucial to

the Gothic style.

And her book influenced the rise of psychological fiction or psychological

thrillers. Jane Austen's Catherine Moreland of Northanger Abbey read this

book and is a kind of female quixote who can't get enough of Gothic literature.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams is a psychological novel that traces the

oppressions of an individual by...

social institutions. Of course, you'll read this and you'll hear Fielding,

you'll hear Richardson in it.

This is probably less important as a novel and more important as a work

that's adjacent to Godwin's political philosophies. But to keep going down

this, pursuing this line of the gothic, the M.G.

Lewis's The Monk. It's very racy, dark, gothic.

novel which really pushes the limits in many ways it did further the gothic

genre to extreme conventions and we still see elements of this very darker

sexual romanticism in horror films today now we move further into historical

fiction away from the gothic but not entirely giving up the gothic when i add

sir walter scott's ivanhoe to this list this is a historical romance and what

scott was best at

was bringing back medieval England within the historical novel. You might

also read his book Old Mortality, which I found to be really good.

Jane Austen, read all of her novels. Read them all. If you haven't already,

take a few weekends and just do that. You won't be disappointed.

So now let's move to Victorian England, where the novel becomes a little more

realistic, a little more realist, and it takes on a new moral dimension.

Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes, Trollope are all interested in this

question. How do we live meaningful lives as human beings interconnected

within complex social environments?

Isn't this the question that we all wrestle with each day?

So let's start with the Brontes sisters.

Charlotte Brontes' most famous novel is Jane Eyre, and rightly so, it's very,

very good, as is her other less-read novel, Valette.

And you'll see her playing with the Gothic style as well. These both are

bildungsroman, meaning they're about the emotional, intellectual development of a

character to maturity.

And they both combine the Gothic elements that were popular in the 18th

century, but they are much more interested in the interiority of women

in society and women's autonomy.

There's Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which is a classic novel of

passion and obsession set on the Yorkshire.

Moore's very romantic setting.

This one is important from a literary perspective because it complicates the

conventions of the Victorian novel.

And you'll see what I mean when you read this.

Actually, I think it's the first book that mentions secondhand smoke.

I've always found that interesting.

James I has the treatise against it, and he mentions secondhand smoke. I think

this is the second one.

in which there's this awareness of secondhand smoke through one of the

characters. Anyway, not point of the novel. You can actually kind of forget I

said that. But it is an interesting moment. A lot of smoking. Anyway, so

Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey is, I think, I think it's my favorite.

Actually, it's more in line with the Victorian novel. That's not why it's my

favorite. I just really like Agnes Grey.

It's more moralistic, yet it's realistic in a way that Wuthering Heights and Jane

Eyre sometimes...

aren't, they're a little too extravagant and whimsical at times, but it's about a

governess navigating social hierarchies and social injustice, and shares some of

the qualities with the novels of the 18th century. You can really see

Fielding's influence here, a little bit of Tom Jones here, a little bit of

Roderick Random, a little bit of Richardson's Pamela, although nothing

too extreme there.

But it's very much in conversation with those previous genres in that it's about

maintaining personal integrity in the face of social injustice.

Charles Dickens. Read as much as you want or can of Charles Dickens, I would

say. Begin with his Bleak House.

Begin with A Tale of Two Cities. Then read Oliver Twist.

then read David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and then Bleak House, and

then Our Mutual Friend.

I have yet to get through Our Mutual Friend. I've tried twice, and I've

just found that I'm kind of too much of a serious reader to enjoy Dickens. What

I mean is, like, I don't have a good sense of humor. If you have a great

sense of humor, you'll really enjoy Dickens. My wife has read everything of

Dickens, so I'm trying to...

enjoy Dickens too. But I'm just a little too serious, I think. I'm not saying

that I'm above the novel. I really do want to laugh at Dickens. I just find

his jokes difficult at times and have to have them explained to me.

Humor in novels is a big, big thing. If you're able to enjoy that, that is a

gift I have yet to be given, let's just say. But Dickens, he's amazing.

his novels dickens's novels are labyrinth time they're concerned with

realistically depicting social injustice and class disparity but you'll also see

there's a degree of extravagant eccentricity with his characters now i'd

say that the classic victorian novelist is probably dickens they're all going to

be very interested in moral development and that's certainly what dickens is

interested in as well his works are important because they critique

victorian society they also give us the episodic style the narrative style is

something new intertwined it's almost like listening to bach in novel form i'm

real enduring influence on the english novel so you have to you have to read

dickens i i find that anthony trollops uh barchester towers it should

definitely be on every list i i feel like i've known a few mr slopes in my

life and i just find the world of barchester towers just absolutely

enchanting and lovable and so realistic.

It's a very socially astute examination of church politics in a small town. If

you know a bit about the Church of England in the 19th century, you'll

especially find it entertaining.

It gives you insight into the Victorian social hierarchies, among other things.

The other great novelist, who I think is way above Dickens, although many of you

probably disagree with that, is George Eliot.

I would read her The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Adam Bede, for starters.

George Eliot, that's her pen name, but her real name is Mary Ann Evans.

So she's a master novelist of realism and of moral realism, and she has such a

narrative sophistication that I just love.

George Meredith, too, is a good novelist of this period. I would read his Egoist.

It's an experiment with psychological realism.

And he's often not taught unless you've taken a novel course, but he's worth

reading all the same. And then, of course, there's Thomas Hardy.

Start with the mayor of Casterbridge.

Be prepared for tragedy.

Jude the Obscure.

Tess of Duberville.

He's the expert at the tragic novel, and he has this unflinching realism that can

be disturbing.

His stories are usually set in rural England, and...

give us this very tragic vision of what life could be like there. So that's a

lot of novelists.

But we haven't even scratched the surface with the Victorian novel. So if

you want to put together a six-week reading plan on the Victorian novel, I

would start with those.

Dickens. Actually, I'd start with these three.

Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. And then maybe move on to the Brontes and

Meredith.

Now I should say something about the American novel, and I'm going to start

with one that's technically not a novel, not even fiction, but it can be read as

one, and that's Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

classic American story of self-invention, rising from poverty

through industry to become the polymath that Franklin was known to be.

It's witty, it's funny, it's great in the 18th century style, it's also very

American, and very amusing, incredibly readable. Next, I go to a novel, proper.

The Leather Stocking Tales, any of them by James Fenmore Cooper.

These are really good stories. They are frontier romances, and they're centered

on this character.

Natty Bumbo, who considers the conflicts of the settlers with the native peoples,

the conflicts between those two. And there's a moment in The Pioneers where

Natty Bumbo is watching the wanton killing of birds and fish.

And he talks about the wasty ways of the settlers, killing things for sport and

just leaving a wreckage, a wake of just kind of garbage.

in their path and i was recently standing beside an aisle of hundreds of

candy wrappers that will outlive me for several lifetimes and that line wasty

ways um it came into my mind again you can really see how well

americans haven't changed much next you have the frederick douglas narratives

he's a great prose writer great order probably one of the best rhetoricians of

the 19th century read his his novella The Heroic Slave. I taught this at

Harvard about this time last year, and it taught like a dream. It's

approachable. It has elements of American religion in it. It's the

abolitionist novel.

But his great work, the one you absolutely have to read, is The

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. And The Narrative is the

actual account of Douglass' escape from slavery, from the American South.

Douglass became one of the greatest rhetoricians of the 19th century, next

to, I think, Abraham Lincoln.

So definitely read his The Heroic Slave, which is a great novella.

next nathaniel hawthorne you have to read the house of seven gables you

should read if you haven't already the scarlet letter um one that's fun if you

know about the transcendentalist is the uh blitzdale romance which is a dark

psychological romance that explores the uh moral isolation of uh well Puritans

and also the utopian settings, I think all of his novels work with these

themes, but the Blithdale romance, or the Blythedale romance, is inspired by a

failed community of transcendentalists. They tried to start a commune, as many

people were doing in the 19th century, by the way.

The commune is a very American invention, it seems.

Hawthorne's novels contain wonderfully symbolic density, and that, I think, is

one of his great strengths.

american symbology if you want to understand that and read hawthorne and

read herman melville now i mentioned uh moby dick under the list of the epics

it's also a novel of course as is billy budd he also has a great symbolic

density and these writers are inventing and reviewing the symbols of american

consciousness and that's what makes them so important from a literary perspective

aside from the fact that their stories are just fantastic um another writer

mark twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This is a river odyssey. So if

you've read the Odyssey, if you've read some of the Book of Acts and maybe

several others, maybe even the Arthurian legends, you'll find that this story

plays into some of those themes of the picaresque novel of the 18th century as

well. You see it's all kind of building up here.

But this novel really exposes the hypocrisies of civilized American life.

It's about a boy choosing conscious...

conscience over law and in that sense i suppose it's like antigone so it matters

because it is a foundational american novel of freedom as is harriet beecher

stowe's uncle tom's cabin this is a novel of moral urgency it was one of the

abolitionist novels it can be sentimental but despite that or perhaps

because of it it's potent in exposing the realities of slavery and then

finally the great the great American novelist Henry James.

In the list of American novels, you should read The Portrait of a Lady.

Wings of the Dove is also good. James' novels are about consciousness and moral

choice. It's also about national identity, this one in particular,

Portrait of a Lady, because it's interesting in the ways in which it

depicts the cultural conflicts between American taste and the European.

decadence. But in that novel you can really feel the differences, the

conflicts between the moral worlds of that narrative.

Now modernism makes the novel into something less straightforward and more

difficult but extraordinary.

The big four here are Joyce, Wolfe, Forster, and Lawrence.

And these novelists experiment with consciousness, with time, with

representing consciousness and time. You could start with James Joyce's The

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

before moving to Ulysses. But both are very important. Virginia Woolf's To the

Lighthouse is another innovation in novelistic narration.

She does a few new things here. So in her 1925 essay, Modern Fiction, she

explains that life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, but a

luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope.

surrounding us. So then the opportunity becomes for the novelist to represent

that consciousness, that halo of consciousness in a novel. So her works

are lyrical and poetic, like Joyce's, but she also employs a stream of

conscious narration, as Joyce will as well, that forms a soliloquy-like novel.

The novels blend narratives.

It really defies explanation, actually, but it's brilliant. So if I were to

assign some reading for six weeks. I would recommend starting with those two,

Joyce and Wolfe, before moving to Forster's Howard's Inn or D.H.

Lawrence's Women in Love, both both important novels here now we move to the

fifth and final section essays and criticism which form really the

intellectual backbone of the literary tradition if you're interested in

philosophy you'll probably enjoy reading from this category in particular move

from classical philosophy to modernist criticism you follow the history of

ideas alongside the history of literature and the essay and criticism

pathway here this list is going to reveal how writers think about writing

and how each age develops its own vocabulary to describe what's going on,

its own mode of representing.

So you should read these as conversations, as moments of thought,

thinking aloud.

Trace the argument as a path of thought and notice how the writers allow the

thought to unfold through metaphor.

Notice what imagery they're using. Notice what comparisons they make.

how they use description how they pace the sentence structure and how the

syntax or the word order unfolds ask yourself what is the writer trying to

awaken in me or to demand of me what is the writer trying to reveal

Essays are going to refine the intellect, and that's one of the

exciting things about this genre.

So let's begin with the Bible.

The essays begin with biblical literature. You could consider the book

of Ecclesiastes essayistic.

You could even read the book of Proverbs in this way, although it's more of a

collection of aphorisms. However, when you get to the New Testament, you'll

find that the Pauline epistles are great examples of essays for rhetorical

arguments. Paul's letter to the Romans is a perfect epistle.

Follow the argumentative architecture of that entire book, and you have to read

it all the way through in one sitting to really see how it fits together, it

culminates, and how it's calling back and forth to each other across the

chapters and unfolds. Great example of an essay.

And then you get to some really excellent essays in the classical

literature category.

These works are going to define aesthetics, rhetoric, poetics, moral

prose, and you'll see that there is a solid foundation here for you for

understanding where many of our ideas about art, literature, poetry, and

politics come from. I'd say start with Plato's Republic and his shorter

dialogue Ion. Learn why Plato is suspicious of poetry and read his

dialogues because they establish the complexities between truth and art, that

whole tension that all of literature is necessarily concerned with. Is it okay

to lie?

Is poetry lying?

Is art, if it's not based on documentary evidence, a lie?

This is a... Actually, you might start with Ion, I think, for this, and then

move into the Republic.

So from Plato moved to Aristotle and his poetics. This is a great understanding

of what tragedy meant for the Greeks and why it's psychologically important to us

today. Cicero's letters are also good here. He was a statesman, often under

pressure.

Writing to friends.

I would add Horace's Ars Poetica. It's funny. It's light. Horace is crystal

clear, luminous as always, and this is a guide to the poetic craft.

Next, I would read Longinus' On the Sublime.

Longinus considers moments of overwhelming spiritual and emotional

elevation, what is called the sublime, and he talks about where it comes from.

How does language communicate that elevating effect of the sublime?

And it's actually amazingly beautiful. It's a fantastic essay. Take a few

hours. I think it'll take a few hours to get through. So those are the classical

essays that I would read. Now, you go into the medieval period in the English

tradition, start with Old English.

You don't have much here.

Old English supplies theological treatises, sermons, and chronicles.

But you should probably start with Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and then

you'll want to move to the Vercelli homily, or some of Alfred's homilies.

Begin with the preface to the first series of Catholic homilies by

him, or his preface to the Lives of Saints, King Canute's Letter to the

English. of 1020 is also worth reading it's more of a letter than it is an

essay but that that's what's there in the old english period now for middle

english you could read chaucer's translation of boethius's consolation on

philosophy that's a very important text but i would definitely also include

julian of norwich's revelation norwich is an amazingly elevating

mystic for much of this period the main literature we have is a poetry and prose

fiction. The Middle English sermons aren't really taught as much. I don't

know if they would be worth reading. I haven't read very many of them. But it's

really the Renaissance and the early modern period that invents the essay

form as we know it. Not a homily, not history, not a

philosophical treatise, but...

a person talking their thoughts aloud.

So let's go to the Renaissance. Let's divide the Renaissance and early modern

writings into those thinking about life and those thinking about art and

literature. So for those thinking about life more broadly, read Francis Bacon's

essays. They're fantastic.

Read his longer work, The Advancement of Learning.

These works show you that thinking clearly about life is a moral and

civic... discipline now for montagna you should probably read john florio's

translation this is what the english were reading if they weren't reading

montagna in the original french but these are really excellent examples of

the mind thinking and laboring in language and montagna shows you what it

means to think and write as a human being if you want something really meaty

and psychological

Go for Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, or at least just read some

excerpts, as admittedly I have done. I've not read that book cover to cover.

It's lengthy, but it's important.

And it treats depression and melancholia as intellectually and literarily

important, worthy of attention.

Read Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici. Actually, I think it's Medici. It's

difficult with the C's in Latin because as I was taught in classical Latin, the

C is a hard C. It's Cicero. But then in the ecclesiastical Latin, it can vary

from a soft C to the Italian C, which like

Cinci, for example, which is very different pronunciation from the

standard way of how Owen uses it in his...

Dolce et decorum est.

Dolce et decorum est. It's the soft C there.

It all depends because that's the way they taught it in English back in the

late 19th and 20th centuries.

So it's really, I'll say it correctly this time.

So Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici is so good and often underrated.

It's fantastic.

Fantastic book. Book of Meditations.

Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying are excellent.

They're all about how to live a pure and spiritual life and how to die well,

which is really the only thing you have to do as a human being. So now for the

essayists who wrote about art.

Sir Philip Sidney's Apology or Defense for Poetry. Your reading of Plato's The

Republic and the Ion will go a long way here. Next, and this is more

theological, is Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity.

Hooker is the great theological architect of the Church of England.

and really beautiful examples of rhetoric in his work. You might check

out John Donne's Devotions and Emergent Occasions. These are explorations of

spiritual vision and spiritual crisis, as Donne's poetry often reveals as well.

There's Isaac Walton's The Lives of Hooker, Donne, and Herbert.

And there's also his The Complete Angler. Not really an essay, but very

delightful. Very delightful book. I have one edition that's illustrated by Arthur

Rackham, which is just one of my favorites. Moving on to John Milton's

Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. These political and moral

treatises defend the liberty of conscience and resistance to tyranny.

They matter because they see intellectual freedom as tied to

spiritual duty.

and it will be increasingly important in coming years for Americans to have

studied these problems and these works, though I fear too few of us do and will

be the worst for it.

Moving on to after the Restoration and during the 18th century, you have a

flourishing of critical treatises. This is a great time for the essay.

John Dryden's essay of dramatic Poesy is a must-read. It's an imagined

dialogue that compares ancient and modern drama, so you having read

Aristotle and the classical essayists will actually help you here.

Dryden's criticism shows us that it's less about dogma and rules, and it's

more about civilization and conversations and a civilizing

conversation. Another great critic of this time, who is often overlooked, is

John Dennis.

I would say read his essay, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern

Poetry, published in 1701.

It's very good, and it was important to the Romantics.

Next, I'd read Alexander Pope's Preface to the Works of Shakespeare, which is

good. You may also read his Preface to the Iliad. He was a translator of the

Iliad. And his verse essay on man is also excellent.

You get a sense with all of these authors that criticism is also an art,

and it should be an art.

Addison and Steele's spectator essays are superlative. If you read nothing off

this list, the whole essay and criticism list, read the spectator essays.

Just read a sampling if you don't want to read all four volumes, or eight,

depending on the edition and how it was printed. They're fantastic.

So I would highly recommend them, and I think they're some of the most important

things you could read.

Now, the 18th century moves on to, as I say, the height of the essay.

You have an anthology, which is very good, that was recently printed. It's

called The Great Age of the English Essay, and it has some of the best

examples. You might start there.

Regardless, you should read Samuel Johnson's The Rambler essays. These are

excellent, as are his essays from The Adventurer and The Idler.

Read Idler number 44 on memory, and then go read Wordsworth's Tin Turn Abbey and

see if you can tell some overlaps there. James Boswell's The Life of Dr.

Johnson is just hilarious and fantastic.

If you really want to learn the art of conversation and what's called table

talk, read that.

Quirky, hilarious, eccentric, everything you would want from the 18th century.

Something a little bit more serious and grounding, though, is... Edmund Burke,

the political and aesthetic theorist. Read his philosophical inquiry into the

origin of our ideas on the sublime. Beautiful essay, 1757.

Read his reflections on the revolution in France, 1790.

And read his political speeches.

The man was incomparable. I don't know how to describe him.

Read his essay on American taxation, by the way.

Start with that. That was his speech.

Start with that. He's brilliant.

Next, if you're interested in theories of art, I'd say read Sir Joshua

Reynolds' Discourses on Art.

Read Edward Gibbons' The Fall of the Roman Empire. You can read excerpts of

this. Just get a sense of his prose.

Gibbons' prose is very... I'd say it's more... I was going to say it was more

difficult than Johnson's. I like Johnson's syntax and the way he writes.

But Gibbons, I think he's a bit clearer than Johnson, but...

a little less elegant and a little less balanced but his writing is important

his writing is beautiful you want to read the history itself and while you

read all of these works compare the prose styles of each notice the way i'm

kind of talking about the prose styles here boswell has his own johnson has a

very distinct prose style gibbon does as well burke is very powerful very i don't

know masculine and william cooper has several essays too that are really

interesting And Joseph Addison is just so accessible.

Pay attention to how the thought is flowing through the words, how the

sentences work like riverbanks that channel thought and work with thought in

order to form what's being read.

Next, we move into the Romantic period.

Romanticism produced the personal reflective essay, so you should

definitely read Charles Lamb's The Essays of Elia.

William Hazlitt's essays on art, the period, are the best. I think he's the

best essayist of the Romantics.

I love Coleridge, but Hazlitt has everyone beat here.

Read his essay on gusto.

I think that's the most entertaining one that could be a great gateway drug into

Hazlitt's other essays.

Coleridge's lectures and his biography of literary area are excellent works of

criticism. I'd say if you've read a bit of Wordsworth's poetry,

I'd say you start with the second volume of the Biographia Literaria and hear how

Coleridge talks about Wordsworth's poetry, how he critiques it. And you'll

also want to read the last chapter, the first volume of Biographia Literaria,

chapter 13, which is on the imagination.

Probably the most important thing that's been said about the imagination is

actually there. Now Wordsworth, his 1800 and 1802 preface to the lyrical ballads

is a good example of his criticism.

De Quincey's prose style,

is angelic. You could read his Confessions of an English Opium Eater as

a whole, but he has a whole shelf of essays.

He's a very good writer. Second, I think, to Hazlitt. Percy Bysshe

Shelley's A Defense of Poetry is just pure music, so read that.

Right, and by the way, if you've also read Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for

Poetry or Defense of Poetry, reading Shelley is just going to be, I think,

enhanced in that way, because he is drawing a bit and departing from Sir

Philip Sidney, and you'll be able to appreciate those differences.

Now let's move into the Victorian essayists. This expands through

influential critics.

Some of the best, Pater, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold.

influenced public intellectual prose.

One of the things that's good to start with, I think, is John Stuart Mill's On

Liberty. His sections on freedom against social conformity and the tyranny of the

majority are i think very relevant to us all matthew arnold's on translating

homer is very good after you've read pope's preface to the iliad this can be

really informing i think it's a great essay on its own you actually don't have

to do any prerequisite reading for it but i just love that this essay tries to

explain how greatness lives on across languages and in ages.

Arthur Macaulay's Milton, his essay on Milton, is a political evaluation of

Milton from a Whiggish perspective.

It's fun, and it shows how politically charged literary criticism can become.

Now, Arthur Henry Hallam, who is the friend of Alfred Lord Tennyson, whom

Tennyson's In Memorial is about, Hallam has an essay on some characteristics of

modern poetry, and he means by modern poetry, Victorian poetry.

because to him it was modern. But he sees Victorian poetry as representing a

shift in feeling.

This is a good essay on art. Another great essay on art is Thomas Carlyle's

Pre-Raphaelitism and Modern Painters. Those are two essays. And what I like of

Carlyle is how he sees art as a form of moral resistance to industrialism and

technological...

unbridled advancement in dehumanization.

Yes, and amen to that. I think we need to read more from Carlyle. You know, all

of these writers in the Victorian period and the Romantic period, they're dealing

with what it means to live in a technological age.

And the ills that we're facing right now, you, me, as humanists, people who

love reading, who love the arts, who love literature, who love culture,

they're wrestling with the same problems that...

I think, have spawned our own. So, you know, if you really want to understand

what's going on with us and where antidotes can be found, start by reading

some of these writers and their poetry, their essays, their novels.

Frankenstein, too, is a very interesting exploration of unbridled scientific

advancement. Now, to return to the essays on aesthetics, Walter Pater, in

his studies in the history of the Renaissance, is wonderful.

read that.

GK Chesterton's essays on life and art and his books are superlative. I would

read Chesterton all day. Now, let's move into the modernist period.

Modernism produces criticism that shapes the discipline of academic study of

literature. And you can see how the criticism of the 20th century begins to

form The way English departments think about themselves.

We're talking about Eliot, Wolfe, F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, the new critics.

So the big essay here, I think, is T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual

Talent.

Read also his essay on the metaphysical poets, because that's the essay that

brought back Dunn. If you went to an English class in high school or if you

studied English in college, you probably read Dunn and his love poetry.

That would have never happened had T.S. Eliot not written this essay, I think.

For centuries, people thought Dunn was eccentric, a bad poet, terribly rough,

as Ben Johnson believed he...

he was ben johnson said his contemporary ben johnson said that dunn deserved

hanging for not keeping meter and he didn't but there is such sophistication

in dunn's poetry many of the other metaphysical poets samuel johnson

famously said that the metaphysical poets were just terrible and this is his

essay on abraham cowley whom i mentioned earlier in the lyric poetry section um

and that opinion was not radical when he said that everyone was kind of taken as

as truth, as gospel. It was basically understood and unchallenged, and for

many years it was unchallenged, until Eliot wrote his essay, The Metaphysical

Poets. Now I'd say also, Eliot's essay on Hamlet and his problems is a great

consideration on Shakespeare's Hamlet. A very provocative argument is made by

Eliot in this essay.

It says that Hamlet is a bad play.

The Great Hamlet by Shakespeare is a bad play, and he lists why. So it's a great

argument on why Hamlet's a bad essay. I'd be curious whether you agree with

it. Next, what else from the modernists?

Ezra Pound's Make It New, which was a collection of essays, became the motto

of modernists. But Virginia Woolf's Modern Fiction already mentioned this.

A Room of One's Own.

How's I Read a Book? And the Modern Essay?

Great examples.

So I would say begin with those two. Just begin with Eliot and Wolfe. If

you're going to read any of the modernist essayists, I would read those

two. Strachey is good, as are several others whom I will not be mentioning in

this video, just for length purposes.

But now let me break up some of the essays for you. Let me give you a list

of those critics and essayists of the 20th century who shaped the study of

English literature as a professional field.

So this is a mini list here. The biggest one is F.R. Leavis, the Cambridge

professor and critic. You should read his essay, New Bearings in English

Poetry.

He was one of the great close readers of the 20th century, really helped

professionalize English literature.

Next comes C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis was famously against

professionalization and was definitely not a fan of Leavis and his clan of

Leavisites, and neither was Helen Gardner either.

But this is a good essay counter to what Leavis was trying to do.

W.K. Wimsatt's The Intentional Fallacy is important.

Theodore Adorno's The Essay as Form.

Meditation on the Essays, it's meta that way.

Joan Didion, read her Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

The White Album is very good.

There's a collection of Walter Benjamin's essays titled Illuminations.

Get that.

Read his essay on Art in the Age of Reproduction.

where he talks about the aura of art.

Next is Susan Sontag in her essays Against Interpretation. These are also

very good.

One of the greatest literary critics of all time, one of my favorites,

Christopher Ricks. Read any of his essays, which is fantastic.

Brad Dillon, essayism on form, feeling, and nonfiction is also important

to this genre.

as is Borges's The Total Library, which is a collection of essays.

Now, I want to close by reiterating what I personally feel is valuable about

literature, and that is its formative power.

Cultural literacy and being well-read has a certain pedigree, but you'll never

read everything you should. You don't need to be a student at a university to

really encounter these works. They are receptive to your reading on their own.

They will respond to your attention by opening up to it, but only if you

respectfully approach them.

under such conditions of reverent attention of careful attention it's

better to be deeply read in a tradition that is important to you personally than

to be deeply read in basically everything and i find that it's best to

let your own desires guide you here never stop reading new things it's true

but at the same time don't feel guilty about reading one author's collected

works the whole collection because you you love this author if you love george

eliot's writing read all of her books You don't have to feel guilty for not

having read Dickens.

But the important thing is, if you want to be a writer, reading is the best

medicine. You need to be reading more than you're writing. We live in an age

when most people are just writing and not reading.

Learn from the past writers.

Imitate them. Experiment with their style. Listen to what makes their style

unique. And above all, enjoy an original relation to the universe, to borrow

from Emerson.

Enjoy an original relation.

to the canon.

This is your life. This is your art.

It's your reading to cultivate a productive relationship to the great

works of the past.

As Blake said, drive your plow over the bones of the dead.

But you do actually have to be familiar with the graveyard to do that.

Thanks, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this very long video of this list. This

was fun for me to make. And I look forward to seeing you next time.