Textbook (obligatory):
- Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students’ Guide, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1994)
Literary texts are in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 9th edition (New York: Norton, 2003)
- Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, ‘They flee from me’
- Philip Sidney, sonnets from Astrophil and Stella: 1 (Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show); 15 (You that do search for every purling spring); 41 (Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance); 45 (Stella oft sees the very face of woe); 71 (Who will in fairest book of Nature know)
- Edmund Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’
- William Shakespeare, sonnets 18, 29, 55, 73, 94, 126, 129, 138, 147
- Aemilia Lanyer, ‘Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women’, ‘The Description of Cookham’
- Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’
- George Herbert, ‘The Collar’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Prayer (1)’, ‘Jordan (1), ‘The Windows’, ‘Denial’, ‘Man’, ‘Jordan (2), ‘Time’, ‘The Flower’, ‘Discipline’, ‘Love (3)’
- John Donne, ‘The Good Morrow’, The Sun Rising’, ‘Love’s Alchemy’, ‘Air and Angels’ ‘The Flea’, ‘The Bait’, ‘The Apparition’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, ‘The Relic’, ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, Elegy 19 (‘To his Mistress going to Bed’), Holy Sonnets 5, 7, 9, 10, 14; ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, Meditation 17
- Mary Wroth, sonnets from Pamphilia to Amphilantus: 16 (Am I thus conquered?); 103 (My muse now happy, lay thyself to rest)
- Thomas Carew, ‘An Elegy Upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr. John Donne
- Andrew Marvell, ‘The Coronet’, ‘Bermudas’, ‘To his Coy Mistress’, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, ‘Damon the Mower’ ‘The Garden’, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’
- John Milton, ‘Lycidas’, ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il Penseroso’. Sonnets: ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’, ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652’, ‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent’ ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’, ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint’
- Katherine Philips, ‘Upon the Double Murder of King Charles’, ‘To Mrs. M. A. at Parting’
- Margaret Cavendish, ‘The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution’