2007 Reading List
(Authors listed chronologically by birthdate)
Geoffrey Chaucer: "Wife of Bath's Prologue," "Merchant's
Tale," "Franklin's Tale"
Edmund Spenser: Fairie Queene, Book 1
Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry
William Shakespeare: Sonnets 18, 29, 30, 43, 55, 73, 116, 130; Twelfth
Night, Othello
John Donne: "The Son Rising," "The Canonization,"
"The Good Morrow," "The Funeral,"
"Elegy 19: Going to Bed," Holy Sonnets 7, 10, 14
John Winthrop: "A Model of Christian Charity"
George Herbert: "The Collar," "Denial"
John Milton: Paradise Lost, Books I, II, IV, VIII, IX, X (lines
706-end), XII (466-end)
Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"
Mary Rowlandson: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels, Parts I, II, IV
Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock, "Epistle to Burlington"
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography
Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, "Preface to Shakespeare"
Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Rivals
Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie
George Gordon, Lord Byron: "She Walk in Beauty," "Darkness,"
Don Juan, Canto I
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Defense of Poetry
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature," "Self-Reliance"
Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Minister's
Black Veil," "My Kinsman Major Molineux," "Rappaccini's
Daughter"
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Herman Melville: "Benito Cereno"
Walt Whitman: "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," "To a Locomotive," "Beat! Beat!
Drums," "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"
Matthew Arnold: "Dover Beach," "Isolation. To Marguerite,"
"To Maguerite-Continued"
Emily Dickinson:
"Undue Significance a starving man attaches"
"I dreaded that first Robin, so"
"I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-"
"This World is not Conclusion"
"I started Early-Took my Dog-"
"My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun-"
"Title divine-is mine!"
"Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant-"
"I taste a liquor never brewed-"
"I dwell in Possibility-"
"There's a certain Slant of light"
"Four Trees-upon a solitary Acre-"
"I had been hungry, all the Years-"
"I cannot live with You-"
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Terrible Sonnets ("To seem the stranger,"
"I wake and feel," "No worst, there is none," "No,
I'll not, carrion comfort," "Patience, hard thing," "My
own heart")
Henry James: "The Aspern Papers," "Daisy Miller"
Oscar Wilde: "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," "Impression
du Matin," "The Harlot's House"
T. S. Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
E. M. Forster: Howards End
Langston Hughes: "The Weary Blues," "The Negro Speaks
of Rivers," "Cross," "Harlem"
Penelope Fitzgerald: The Gate of Angels
Iris Murdock: The Bell
Philip Larkin: "On Church Going," "Aubade"
Flannery O'Connor: "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "The
Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People"
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun
Michael Frayn: Noises Off
David Lodge: Nice Work
Tom Stoppard: Arcadia
August Wilson: Fences
