Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM
Introduction to The Age of Romanticism
Political Parties and Royal Allegiances
Imperial Expansion
The Romantic Mind and Its Literary Productions
The Business of Literature
“Romantic”
A Changing Language
History of the Language and of Print Culture
ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD
Washing Day
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem
WILLIAM BLAKE
from Songs of Innocence and of Experience
from Songs of Innocence
Introduction
The Ecchoing Green
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Chimney Sweeper
The Divine Image
Holy Thursday
Infant Joy
Nurse’s Song
from Songs of Experience
Introduction
The Clod & the Pebble
Holy Thursday
The Chimney Sweeper
The Sick Rose
The Fly
The Tyger
Ah! Sun-Flower
The Garden of Love
London
The Human Abstract
Infant Sorrow
A Poison Tree
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Introduction
Chapter 2: The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
from Chapter 3: The Same Subject Continued
In Context: Contemporary Reviews of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
from The Analytical Review 12
from The Critical Review 4
from Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman
Chapter 5
ROBERT BURNS
To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough
The Fornicator
Halloween
Address to the De’il
Flow gently, sweet Afton
Ae Fond Kiss
Robert Bruce’s March To Bannockburn
A Man’s A Man For A’ That
Comin’ thro’ the Rye
A Red, Red Rose
Auld Lang Syne
Love and Liberty. A Cantata
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
from Lyrical Ballads, 1798
Advertisement
We Are Seven
Lines Written in Early Spring
The Thorn
Expostulation and Reply
The Tables Turned
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
from Lyrical Ballads, 1800, 1802
Preface
[There was a Boy]
[Strange fits of passion I have known]
Song [She dwelt among th’untrodden ways]
[A slumber did my spirit seal]
Lucy Gray
Nutting
Michael, A Pastoral Poem
[I Griev’d for Buonaparté]
Ode to Duty
Resolution and Independence
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
[The world is too much with us]
[It is a beauteous Evening]
London, 1802
The Solitary Reaper
[My heart leaps up]
In Context: “I wandered lonely as a cloud”: Stages in the Life of a Poem
from Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (15 April 1802)
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] 1807
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] facsimile
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] 1815
Elegiac Stanzas
Ode [Intimations of Immortality]
from The Excursion
[The Ruined Cottage]
Surprised by Joy
Mutability
Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways
In Context: Visual Depictions of “Man’s Art”
CONTEXTS: READING, WRITING, PUBLISHING
from Daniel Isaac Eaton, The Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing Upon Society, Exposed
Thomas Spence, “Examples of Safe Printing,” from Pig’s Meat
Joshua, “Sonnet: The Lion,” from Moral and Political Magazine
from Anonymous, “On the Characteristics of Poetry” No. 2, from Monthly Magazine
from Anonymous, Letter to the Monthly Magazine
from Samuel Pratt, Gleanings in England: Descriptive of the Countenance, Mind, and Character of the Country
from Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
from Chapter 8: On Female Study
from Charles and Mary Lamb, “Preface,” Tales from Shakespeare
from an advertisement in The Times for Thomas Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing”
from Isaac D’Israeli, The Case of Authors Stated, Including the History of Literary Property
William Hazlitt, “A Review of The St. James Chronicle, The Morning Chronicle, The Times, The New Times, The Courier, &c., Cobbett’s Weekly Journal, The Examiner, The Observer, The Gentleman’s Magazine, The New Monthly Magazine, The London, &c., &c.,” from The Edinburgh Review
from John Stuart Mill, “The Present State of Literature”
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Eolian Harp
Fears In Solitude
Frost at Midnight
from The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts (1798)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Seven Parts (1817)
In Context: The Origin of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14
from A letter from the Rev. Alexander Dyce to Hartley Coleridge, 1852
The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
Christabel
Dejection: An Ode
Work Without Hope
Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
Epitaph
On Donne’s Poetry
from Lectures and Notes On Literature
[Definition of Poetry]
[Mechanic Vs. Organic Form]
from Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions
from Chapter 1
Reception of the Author’s First Publication
The Effect of Contemporary Writers on Youthful Minds
Bowles’s Sonnets
from Chapter 4: Mr. Wordsworth’s Earlier Poems
from Chapter 11: An affectionate exortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors
from Chapter 13: On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power
Chapter 14: Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads
from Chapter 17: Examination of the Tenets Peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth
JANE AUSTEN
from Pride and Prejudice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
WILLIAM HAZLITT
from The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits
Mr. Coleridge
Mr. Wordsworth
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
To the Reader
Preliminary Confessions
from Part 2
The Pleasures of Opium
Introduction to the Pains of Opium
The Pains of Opium
MARY PRINCE
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself
In Context: Mary Prince and Slavery
Mary Prince’s Petition Presented to Parliament on June 24, 1829
from Thomas Pringle, Supplement to The History of Mary Prince
from The Narrative of Ashton Warner
CONTEXTS: THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
from John Newton, A Slave Trader’s Journal
from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species
from Alexander Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
William Cowper, “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce, or, The Slave-Trader in the Dumps”
from William Wilberforce, “Speech to the House of Commons,” 13 May 1789
Proponents of Slavery
from Rev. Robert Boncher Nicholls, Observations, Occasioned by the Attempts Made in England to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade
from Anonymous, Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes, as it Affects the British Colonies in the West Indies: Humbly Submitted to the Consideration of Both Houses of Parliament
from Gordon Turnbull, An Apology of Negro Slavery; or, the West India Planters Vindicated from the Charge of Inhumanity
from Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade”
William Blake, Images of Slavery
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade
from William Earle, Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack
Mary Robinson, Poems on Slavery
“The African”
“The Negro Girl”
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
Sun of the Sleepless
She walks in beauty
When we two parted
Stanzas for Music
Darkness
Prometheus
So, we’ll go no more a roving
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home
January 22nd 1842. Missolonghi
Epistle to Augusta
from Don Juan
Dedication
Canto 1
from Canto 2
from Canto 3
from Canto 7
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
To Wordsworth
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Mutability
Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Ozymandias
Ode to the West Wind
The Cloud
To a Skylark
Adonais. An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
from Hellas
Chorus (“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever”)
Chorus (“The world’s great age begins anew”)
Mutability (“The flower that smiles to-day”)
Stanzas, Written in Dejection – December 1818, near Naples
Sonnet [Lift Not the Painted Veil]
To Night
To — (“Music, when soft voices die”)
Song to the Men of England
England in 1819
from A Defence of Poetry
FELICIA HEMANS
The Homes of England
The Land of Dreams
Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School
Casabianca
Corinne at the Capitol
The Effigies
The Image in Lava
Properzia Rossi
Woman and Fame
JOHN KEATS
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
Sleep and Poetry
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be
Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds
To Homer
The Eve of St. Agnes
Bright Star
La Belle Dame sans Merci
La Belle Dame sans Mercy
Incipit altera Sonneta
Ode to Psyche
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Indolence
To Autumn
Lamia
This Living Hand
Selected Letters
To Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817)
To George and Thomas Keats (December 1817)
To John Hamilton Reynolds (3 February 1818)
To John Taylor (27 February 1818)
To Benjamin Bailey (13 March 1818)
To Benjamin Bailey (18 July 1818)
To Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818)
To George and Georgiana Keats (14 February – 3 May 1819)
To Fanny Brawne (25 July 1819)
To Percy Bysshe Shelley (16 August 1820)
To Charles Brown (30 November 1820)
In Context: Politics, Poetry, and the “Cockney School Debate”
from Leigh Hunt, “Young Poets”
from John Lockhart (“Z.”), “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 1”
from John Lockhart (“Z.”), “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 4”
MARY SHELLEY
from The Last Man
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
In Context: The “Last Man” Theme in the Nineteenth Century
Thomas Campbell, “The Last Man”
from Thomas Campbell’s letter to the editor of The Edinburgh Review, 28 February 1825
John Martin’s painting of The Last Man
THE VICTORIAN ERA
Introduction to The Victorian Era
A Growing Power
Grinding Mills, Grinding Poverty
Corn Laws, Potato Famine
“The Two Nations”
The Politics of Gender
Empire
Faith and Doubt
Victorian Domesticity
Cultural Trends
Technology
Cultural Identities
Realism
The Victorian Novel
Poetry
Drama
Prose Non-Fiction and Print Culture
The English Language in the Victorian Era
History of the Language and of Print Culture
THOMAS CARLYLE
from Sartor Resartus
from Book 2
Chapter 6: Sorrows of Teufelsdræckh
from Book 3
Chapter 8: Natural Supernaturalism
from Past and Present
from Book 1
Chapter 1: Midas
Chapter 6: Hero-Worship
from Book 3
Chapter 2: Gospel of Mammonism
Chapter 13: Democracy
from Book 4
Chapter 4: Captains of Industry
CONTEXTS: WORK AND POVERTY
Anonymous, “The Steam Loom Weaver”
from Elizabeth Bentley, Testimony before the 1832 Committee on the Labour of Children in Factories
from Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures
from William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, Factory Cripple, Written by Himself
from Joseph Adshead, Distress in Manchester, Chapter 3: “Narratives of Suffering”
Thomas Hood, “Song of the Shirt”
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Chapter 3, “The Great Towns”
from Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, Chapter 6
from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, “Boy Crossing-Sweepers and Tumblers”
from Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Chapter 5, “The Key-Note”
JOHN STUART MILL
from The Subjection of Women
Chapter 1
CONTEXTS: THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY
from Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities
from Anonymous, “Hints on the Modern Governess System,” Fraser’s Magazine
from Harriet Taylor, The Enfranchisement of Women
from Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House
The Wife’s Tragedy
The Foreign Land
from Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” Saturday Review, March 1868
from Frances Power Cobbe, “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors,” Fraser’s Magazine, December 1868
from “Between School and Marriage,” The Girl’s Own Paper, Vol. 7
from Emma Brewer, “Our Friends the Servants,” The Girl’s Own Paper, Vol. 14
from Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review 158
from Mona Caird, “Does Marriage Hinder A Woman’s Self-Development?” Lady’s Realm
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The Cry of the Children
To George Sand: A Desire
To George Sand: A Recognition
A Year’s Spinning
The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point
from Sonnets from the Portuguese
Sonnet 1 (“I thought once how Theocritus had sung”)
Sonnet 7 (“The face of all the world is changed, I think”)
Sonnet 13 (“And wilt thou have me fasten into speech”)
Sonnet 21 (“Say over again, and yet once over again”)
Sonnet 22 (“When our two souls stand up erect and strong”)
Sonnet 24 (“Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife”)
Sonnet 26 (“I lived with visions for my company”)
Sonnet 28 (“My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!”)
Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Mariana
The Palace of Art
The Lady of Shalott
The Lotos-Eaters
Ulysses
The Epic [Morte d’Arthur]
Morte d’Arthur
[Break, break, break]
Locksley Hall
from The Princess
[Sweet and Low]
[The Splendour Falls]
[Tears, Idle Tears]
[Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal]
[Come Down, O Maid]
[The Woman’s Cause is Man’s]
In Memoriam A.H.H.
The Eagle
The Charge of the Light Brigade
[Flower in the Crannied Wall]
Vastness
Crossing the Bar
In Context: Images of Tennyson
from Thomas Carlyle, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 5 August 1844
In Context: Victorian Images of Arthurian Legend
In Context: Crimea and the Camera
Roger Fenton, Selected Photographs
ROBERT BROWNING
Porphyria’s Lover
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
My Last Duchess
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church
Meeting at Night
Parting at Morning
How It Strikes a Contemporary
Memorabilia
Love Among the Ruins
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
Fra Lippo Lippi
The Last Ride Together
Andrea del Sarto
A Woman’s Last Word
CHARLES DICKENS
from Sketches by Boz
Chapter 2: A Christmas Dinner
A Walk in the Workhouse
EMILY BRONTË
Remembrance
Plead for Me
The Old Stoic
My Comforter
[Loud without the wind was roaring]
[A little while, a little while]
[Shall Earth no more inspire thee]
[No coward soul is mine]
Stanzas
[The night is darkening round me]
[I’m happiest when most away]
[If grief for grief can touch thee]
GEORGE ELIOT
O, May I Join the Choir Invisible
from Brother and Sister Sonnets
Sonnet 11 (“School parted us; we never found again”)
from Adam Bede
Chapter 17: In Which the Story Pauses a Little
JOHN RUSKIN
from Modern Painters
A Definition of Greatness in Art
Of Truth of Water
from The Stones of Venice
The Nature of Gothic
MATTHEW ARNOLD
The Forsaken Merman
Isolation. To Marguerite
To Marguerite—Continued
The Buried Life
The Scholar-Gipsy
Stanzas from The Grande Chartreuse
Dover Beach
East London
West London
from The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
The Blessed Damozel
The Woodspurge
Jenny
My Sister’s Sleep
Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee
from The House of Life
The Sonnet
Sonnet 6a. Nuptial Sleep
Sonnet 10. The Portrait
Sonnet 77. Soul’s Beauty
Sonnet 78. Body’s Beauty
Sonnet 97. A Superscription
Sonnet 101. The One Hope
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Goblin Market
In Context: Illustrating Goblin Market
A Triad
Remember
A Birthday
After Death
An Apple-Gathering
Echo
Winter: My Secret
“No, Thank You, John”
A Pause Of Thought
Song (“She sat and sang alway”)
Song (“When I am dead, my dearest”)
Dead Before Death
Monna Innominata
Cobwebs
In an Artist’s Studio
Promises like Pie-crust
In Progress
Sleeping at Last
LEWIS CARROLL
Verses Recited by Humpty Dumpty
Jabberwocky
In Context: “Jabberwocky”
from Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
from Chapter 1: Looking-Glass House
from Chapter 6: Humpty Dumpty
In Context: The Photographs of Lewis Carroll
AUGUSTA WEBSTER
A Castaway
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Hymn to Proserpine
A Forsaken Garden
THOMAS HARDY
The Son’s Veto
In Context: Hardy’s Notebooks and Memoranda
Hap
Neutral Tones
The Darkling Thrush
The Ruined Maid
A Broken Appointment
Shut out that Moon
The Convergence of the Twain
Channel Firing
The Voice
Transformations
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
The Photograph
During Wind and Rain
The Oxen
Going and Staying
In Context: Hardy’s Reflections on the Writing of Poetry
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
God’s Grandeur
The Wreck of the Deutschland
The Windhover: to Christ our Lord
Pied Beauty
Felix Randal
Spring and Fall: to a Young Child
[As kingfishers catch fire]
[No worst, there is none]
[I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day]
[Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort]
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
[Thou art indeed just, Lord]
In Context: The Growth of “The Windhover”
from Journal 1870-1874
[“Inscape” and “Instress”]
from Letter to Robert Bridges, 25 February 1879
Author’s Preface
“MICHAEL FIELD” — KATHARINE BRADLEY AND EDITH COOPER
The Magdalen
La Gioconda
A girl
It was deep April, and the morn
To Christina Rossetti
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Requiem
from A Child’s Garden of Verses
Whole Duty of Children
Looking Forward
The Land of Nod
Good and Bad Children
Foreign Children
OSCAR WILDE
Impression du Matin
E Tenebris
To Milton
from “The Critic as Artist”
from “The Decay of Lying”
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Importance of Being Earnest
In Context: Wilde and “The Public”
Interview with Oscar Wilde, St. James Gazette, January 1895
In Context: The First Wilde Trial (1895)
from The Transcripts of the Trial
VERNON LEE
The Virgin of the Seven Daggers
RUDYARD KIPLING
Gunga Din
The Widow at Windsor
Recessional
The White Man’s Burden
If—
In Context: Victoria and Albert
In Context: The “White Man’s Burden” in the Philippines
Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League
CONTEXTS: RACE, EMPIRE, AND A WIDER WORLD
from Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
from Chapter 1: Entrance of the Mississippi
from Chapter 3: Company on Board the Steam Boat
from Chapter 34: Return to New York—Conclusion
from Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education”
from Report of a Speech by William Charles Wentworth, Australian Legislative Council
from William H. Smith, Smith’s Canadian Gazetteer
Carlyle, Mill, and “The Negro Question”
from Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine
from John Stuart Mill, “The Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine
from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
“Hindo Beggars”
Dickens and Thackeray on the Race Question
from Charles Dickens, “The Noble Savage,” Household Words
from William Makepeace Thackeray, Letters to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth
To Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, 26 January 1853
To Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, 13 February 1853
Conservatives, Liberals, and Empire
from William Gladstone, “Our Colonies”
from Benjamin Disraeli, “Conservative and Liberal Principles”
from Cecil Rhodes, Speech Delivered in Cape Town, 18 July 1899
from David Livingstone, “Cambridge Lecture Number 1”
Eliza M., “Account of Cape Town,” King William’s Town Gazette
from Agnes Macdonald, “By Car and Cowcatcher,” Murray’s Magazine
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND
Introduction to The Early Twentieth Century: From 1900 to Mid-Century
The Edwardian Period
The World Wars
Marx, Einstein, Freud, and Modernism
The Place of Women
Avant-Garde and Mass Culture
Sexual Orientation
Ireland
Ideology and Economics in the 1930s and 1940s
The Literature of the 1930s and 1940s
Literature and Empire
The English Language in the Early Twentieth Century
History of the Language and of Print Culture
BERNARD SHAW
Mrs Warren’s Profession
JOSEPH CONRAD
An Outpost of Progress
The Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”
The Secret Sharer
A.E. HOUSMAN
Loveliest of Trees
To an Athlete Dying Young
Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
They
Glory of Women
Everyone Sang
from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
WILFRED OWEN
Arms and the Boy
Dulce et Decorum Est
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Strange Meeting
Futility
CONTEXTS: WAR AND REVOLUTION
from Anonymous, “Introduction” to Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time
“In Flanders Fields”: The Poem and Some Responses
John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”
John Mitchell, “Reply to ‘In Flanders Fields'”
J.A. Armstrong, “Another Reply to ‘In Flanders Fields'”
Elizabeth Daryush, “Flanders Fields”
Anonymous, “I Learned to Wash in Shell-Holes”
J.P. Long and Maurice Scott, “Oh! It’s a Lovely War”
from Rebecca West, “The Cordite Makers”
from Francis Marion Beynon, Aleta Day
from Chapter 24: War
Ivor Gurney, “To his Love”
Vance Palmer, “The Farmer Remembers the Somme”
from Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That
from Chapter 17
from May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices
from “Proceedings” of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
When You Are Old
Who Goes with Fergus?
Adam’s Curse
No Second Troy
Easter 1916
The Wild Swans at Coole
In Memory of Major Robert Gregory
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
A Prayer for my Daughter
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
The Second Coming
Meditations in Time of Civil War
Leda and the Swan
Among School Children
Sailing to Byzantium
The Tower
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
Byzantium
For Anne Gregory
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
Lapis Lazuli
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
Under Ben Bulben
In Context: The Struggle for Irish Independence
Poblacht na h-Eireann / Proclamation of the Irish Republic
Pádraic Pearse, “Statement”
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The Mark on the Wall
Blue & Green
Kew Gardens
Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street
Modern Fiction
from A Room of One’s Own
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
from “A Sketch of the Past”
In Context: Woolf and Bloomsbury
JAMES JOYCE
Eveline
Araby
The Dead
from Ulysses
Chapter 13 [Nausicaa]
D.H. LAWRENCE
Tortoise Shout
Snake
Bavarian Gentians
The Prussian Officer
Odour of Chrysanthemums
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Bliss
The Garden Party
T.S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Preludes
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar
Gerontion
The Waste Land
Journey of the Magi
Marina
Burnt Norton
Tradition and the Individual Talent
The Metaphysical Poets
In Context: T.S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism
JEAN RHYS
Let Them Call It Jazz
GEORGE ORWELL
from Homage to Catalonia
Politics and the English Language
Shooting an Elephant
In Context: Elephants in Asia
SAMUEL BECKETT
Krapp’s Last Tape
W.H. AUDEN
[O what is that sound]
[At last the secret is out]
[Funeral Blues]
Spain 1937
[Lullaby]
[As I walked out one evening]
Musée des Beaux Arts
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
September 1, 1939
from The Sea and the Mirror
[Song of the Master and Boatswain]
The Shield of Achilles
“The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning”
In Context: Auden on the Nature and Craft of Poetry
from “Writing”
Introduction to the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond: 1945 to the Twenty-First Century
The End of the War and the Coming of the Welfare State
The End of Empire
From the 1960s to Century’s End
Ireland, Scotland, Wales
The New Millennium
The History of the English Language
DYLAN THOMAS
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
Fern Hill
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
PHILIP LARKIN
Days
Church Going
Talking in Bed
Dockery and Son
Annus Mirabilis
High Windows
This Be The Verse
Vers de Société
The Old Fools
Aubade
TED HUGHES
The Thought-Fox
Pike
Wodwo
Theology
A Childish Prank
The Seven Sorrows
Heptonstall Old Church
You Hated Spain
Daffodils
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Sacrificial Egg
from “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
SEAMUS HEANEY
Digging
Thatcher
The Wife’s Tale
The Grauballe Man
Punishment
Casualty
Seeing Things
Englands of the Mind
ALICE MUNRO
The View from Castle Rock
NGUGI WA THIONG’O
from Decolonising the Mind
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
ANGELA CARTER
The Bloody Chamber
JOHN CLEESE AND GRAHAM CHAPMAN
from Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Dead Parrot Sketch
Pet Conversation
Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook
Spam
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Is Nothing Sacred?
KAZUO ISHIGURO
A Village After Dark
CAROL ANN DUFFY
Stealing
Adultery
The Good Teachers
Drunk
Mean Time
Mrs. Lazarus
Wish
Rapture
APPENDICES
Reading Poetry
Maps
Monarchs and Prime Ministers of Great Britain
Glossary of Terms
British Money
Texts and Contexts: Chronological Chart
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index of First Lines
Index of Authors and Titles