A Love through the Ages Reading List:

POETRY:
14th Century The Middle Ages:
♦ Chaucer – The Miller’s Tale – parody of Courtly and Chivalric love
The Knight’s Tale – Courtly, Chivalric Love
The Wife of Bath’s Tale

15th Century:
♦ Malory – Le Morte d’Arthur

16th Century , The Renaissance (1509 – 47) and The Elizabethans (1558 –
1603):
♦ Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 42) Greatly influenced by Petrarch –
lots of sonnets
♦ Sir Philip Sidney (1554 -86) “Astrophil and Stella” sonnets (read a
couple)
♦ Edmund Spenser (1552 – 91) “The Faerie Queene” (just read a bit
of this… unless you like it of course, then knock yourselves out.)
♦ Shakespeare (1565 – 1616) Sonnets – “My Mistress’ Eyes are
nothing like the sun” and “The expense of spirit in a waste of
Shame”

16th and 17th Century – Jacobean (1603 – 25)

The Metaphysicals:
♦ John Donne (1572 – 1631) “ The Flea”, “The Sunne Rising”
♦ Andrew Marvel (1621 – 78) “To His Coy Mistress”

17th Century
♦ John Milton (1608 – 74) (I’ll find you some extracts from “Paradise
Lost”. You don’t have to read it all)

18th Century – The Augustans:

♦ Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) “The Rape of the Lock

18th Century – The Romantics:

♦ William Blake (1757 – 1827) “Songs of Innocence and Experience”
Read a couple of each.
♦ William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) “The Lucy Poems”
♦ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1776 – 1849) “Frost at Midnight”
♦ John Keats (1795 – 1821) “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
 ♦ George, Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) “Don Juan” was his great
work, but if you’d like a shorter version, try “Beppo”. (Hilarious)

19th Century – The Victorians (1837 – 1901)

♦ Christina Rossetti (1831 – 94) “A Birthday”, “Remember”
♦ Emily Dickinson (1830 – 86) “My Life Closed Twice”, “Love’s
Stricken Way”
♦ Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 92) “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”
♦ William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) “When you are old and grey and
full of sleep” “Prayer for my daughter”
♦ Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) “The Voice” ( written after the death
of his wife)

20th Century – The Edwardians

War Poems:
Wilfred Owen
Vera Brittain

20th Century – Modernism (1910 – 52)

♦ TS Eliot (1888 – 1965) “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock” – sad,
sad, sad. A man who has not dared to love, not dared to be that
vulnerable.
♦ WH Auden (1907 – 1973)

20th Century – Post Modernism (1952 - )

♦ Ted Hughes (1930 – 1998)
♦ Sylvia Plath (1932 – 63)
♦ Philip Larkin 1922 – 1985)
♦ Wendy Cope (1945 -)
♦ Jackie Kaye (1961 - )
♦ Pablo Neruda “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”