I. Classicism --
from The Iliad / Homer --
from The Odyssey / Homer --
On losing his shield / Archilochus --
Ode to Aphrodite / Sappho --
Hesperus, the bringer / Sappho --
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel / Sappho --
The wounded Cupid / Anacreon --
First Olympian ode / Pindar --
A twofold truth / Empedocles --
Heraclitus / Callimachus --
Crethis / Callimachus --
from Agamemnon / Aeschylus --
Antigone / Sophocles --
from Medea / Eripides --
The death of Socrates from Phaedo / Plato --
The nature of tradegy from On tragedy / Aristotle --
Theocritus / The Incantation --
from Of the nature of things / Lucretius --
from Aeneid / Virgil --
On lesbia / Catullus --
Love is best / Catullus --
After a quarrel / Catullus --
At the grave of his brother / Catullus --
To postumus / Horace --
Orpheus and Eurydice / Ovid --
The Tuscan villa / Pliny the Younger --
from The villas of Pliny the Younger / Pliny the Younger --
from The meditations / Marcus Aurelius --
II. Christianity and the Middle Ages --
The creation / Bible --
The Messiah / Bible --
Psalms / Bible --
The annunciation / Bible --
The birth of Christ / Bible --
The last supper / Bible --
from Confessions / Saint Augustine --
from Beowulf / Anonymous --
from The song of Roland / Anonymous --
Te Deum / Anonymous --
from Little flowers / Saint Francis of Assisi --
Dies Irae / Thomas of Celano --
five cantos from The inferno / Dante Alighieri --
from the Divine comedy / Dante Alighieri --
from Sir Gawain and the green knight / Anonymous --
The Prioress/s tale from The Canterbury tales / Geoffrey Chaucer --
St. Mark's from The stones of Venice / John Ruskin --
The Virgin of Chartres / Henry Adams --
from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres / Henry Adams --
III. Renaissance --
from An hymn in honour of beauty / Edmund Spenser --
The powers and pleasures of folly / Desiderius Erasmus --
from The praise of folly / Desiderius Erasmus --
The plague of 1348 / Giovanni Boccaccio --
The falcon of Federigo / Giovanni Boccaccio --
Chichibio and the crane / Giovanni Boccaccio --
The patient Griselda / Giovanni Boccaccio --
from the Decameron / Giovanni Boccaccio --
If it be destined / Petrarch --
When I reflect / Petrarch --
In gratitude to love / Petrarch --
Her golden hair / Petrarch --
On hearing of Laura's death / Petrarch --
He sees her everywhere / Petrarch --
Final sonnet / Petrarch --
In what way faith should be kept by princes / Niccolo Machiavelli --
Fortune is a woman / Niccolo Machiavelli --
from The prince / Niccolo Machiavelli --
The casting of the Perseus / Benvenuto Cellini --
Description of the contrarious passions in a lover / Sir Thomas Wyatt --
Complaint of a lover rebuked / Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey --
To Marie / Pierre de Ronsard --
Sonnet 15 (Ye tradeful merchants) / Edmund Spenser --
With how sad steps / Sir Philip Sidney --
Leave me, o love / Sir Philip Sidney --
Since there's no help / Michael Drayton --
Sonnet 8 (music to hear) / William Shakespeare --
Sonnet 18 (shall I compare thee) / William Shakespeare --
Sonnet 30 (when to the sessions) / William Shakespeare --
Sonnet 55 (not marble nor the gilded monument) / William Shakespeare --
Sonnet 73 (that time of year) / William Shakespeare --
Who is Sylvia? / William Shakespeare --
The silver swan / Orlando Gibbons --
La Gioconda / Walter Pater --
from The Renaissance / Walter Pater --
Monna Lisa Gioconda / Dmitri Merezhkovsky --
from The romance of Leonarda da Vinci / Dmitri Merezhkovsky --
The sculpturing of the David / Irving Stone --
from The agony and the ecstasy / Irving Stone --
IV. Mannerism to Neoclassicism --
from The flaming heart or the life of the glorious Saint Teresa / Saint Teresa of Avila --
from Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes --
The obscure night of the soul / Saint John of the Cross --
Meditation 17 / John Donne --
Song / John Donne --
Song / John Donne --
from Holy sonnets / John Donne --
A hymn to God the father / John Donne --
The altar / George Herbert --
Easter wings / George Herbert --
The dream called life / Calderón --
from Life is a dream / Calderón --
Lycidas / John Milton --
from Paradise lost / John Milton --
To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell --
from The bourgeois gentleman / Moliére --
A song for St. Cecilia's Day / John Dryden --
Housewifery / Edward Taylor --
A voyage to Brobdingnag / Jonathan Swift --
from Gulliver's travels / Jonathan Swift --
from An essay on man / Alexander Pope --
from Candide / Voltaire --
To daffodils / Robert Herrick --
Corinna's going a-maying / Robert Herrick --
The syndics from Rembrandt / Gladys Schmitt --
V. Romanticism --
Continental --
Du bist wie eine blume / Heinrich Heine --
The two grenadiers / Heinrich Heine --
The djinns / Victor Hugo --
Art / Théophile Gautier --
Sois sage o ma douleur / Charles Baudelaire --
Correspondences / Charles Baudelaire --
from The confessions / Jean-Jacques Rousseau --
from Faust I / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --
The Erl-King / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --
from Eugene Onegin / Alexander Pushkin --
The singers / Ivan Turgenev --
English --
Introduction / William Blake --
The divine image / William Blake --
from Songs of innocence / William Blake --
A poison tree / William Blake --
London / William Blake --
from Songs of experience / William Blake --
Ye flowery banks / Robert Burns --
Afton Water / Robert Burns --
A red, red rose / Robert Burns --
Composed upon Westminster Bridge / William Wordsworth --
My heart leaps up when I behold / William Wordsworth --
I wandered lonely as a cloud / William Wordsworth --
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free / William Wordsworth --
Kubla Khan: or, A vision in a dream / Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
The eolian harp / Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Canto the fourth / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
from Don Juan / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
Stanzas for music / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
She walks in beauty / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
from Hebrew melodies / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
Ode to the west wind / Percy Bysshe Shelley --
Mutability / Percy Bysshe Shelley --
Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley --
La belle dame sans mercy / John Keats --
Ode to a nightingale / John Keats --
Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats --
The last sonnet / John Keats --
Mariana / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Sweet and low / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
The splendor falls on castle walls / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Tears, idle tears / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Now sleeps the crimson petal / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
songs from The princess / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
My last duchess / Robert Browning --
The bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed's Church / Robert Browning --
Fra Lippo Lippi / Robert Browning --
Meeting at night / Robert Browning --
The forsaken merman / Matthew Arnold --
Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold --
Silent noon / Dante Gabriel Rossetti --
A birthday / Christina Rossetti --
The garden of Proserpine / Algernon Charles Swinburne --
When the hounds of spring / Algernon Charles Swinburne --
from Atalanta in Claydon / Algernon Charles Swinburne --
The oxen / Thomas Hardy --
In time of "The breaking of nations" / Thomas Hardy --
The darkling thrush / Thomas Hardy --
God's grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
The windhover / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Spring and fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
To an Athlete dying young / A.E. Housman --
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / A.E. Housman --
American --
The wild honeysuckle / Philip Freneau --
To a waterfowl / William Cullen Bryant --
The rhodora / Ralph Waldo Emerson --
Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson --
Hymn to the night / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
from Divina Commedia / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
translation of Michelangelo's Dante / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
To Helen / Edgar Allan Poe --
Ulalume / Edgar Allan Poe --
Israfel / Edgar Allan Poe --
When I heard the learn'd astronomer / Walt Whitman --
There was a child went forth / Walt Whitman --
To hear an oriole sing / Emily Dickinson --
There's a certain slant of light / Emily Dickinson --
There is no frigate like a book / Emily Dickinson --
Evening song / Sidney Lanier --
A ballad of trees and the master / Sidney Lanier --
Masque of the Red Death / Edgar Allan Poe --
The wedding knell / Nathaniel Hawthorne --
VI. Realism and impressionism --
The master builder / Henrik Ibsen --
Three deaths: a tale / Leo Tolstoy --
from The innocents abroad / Mark Twain --
Afternoon of a faun / Stéphane Mallarmé --
Song of autumn / Paul Verlaine --
Thou hast wounded me, Lord --
Paul Verlaine --
Preface to The picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde --
Shaw on music / George Bernard Shaw --
from Androcles and the lion / George Bernard Shaw --
In the cart / Anton Pavlovich Chekhov --
from Pelléas and Mélisande / Maurice Maeterlinck VII. Twentieth century --
The lake isle of Innisfree / William Butler Yeats --
The wild swans of Coole / William Butler Yeats --
When you are old / William Butler Yeats --
Luke Havergal / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
The graveyard by the sea / Paul Valéry --
Acquainted with the night / Robert Frost --
Tree at my window / Robert Frost --
The onset / Robert Frost --
The tuft of flowers / Robert Frost --
Autumn day / Rainer Maria Rilke --
Autumn / Rainer Maria Rilke --
The panther / Rainer Maria Rilke --
Little Lizzy / Thomas Mann --
Paul's case / Willa Cather --
Within and without / Hermann Hesse --
On growing old / John Masefield --
Fog / Carl Sandburg --
Nocturne in a deserted brickyard / Carl Sandburg --
Jazz fantasia / Carl Sandburg --
Wind song / Carl Sandburg --
Peter Quince at the clavier / Wallace Stevens --
The road from Colonus / E.M. Forster --
from Platero and I / Juan Ramón Jiménez --
Clay / James Joyce --
from Dubliners / James Joyce --
from The odyssey: a modern sequel / Nikos Kazantzakis --
Piano / D.H Lawrence --
Dawn / William Carlos Williams --
Velvet shoes / Elinor Wylie --
Castilian / Elinor Wylie --
The river-merchant's wife: a letter / Ezra Pound --
A virginal / Ezra Pound --
Hurt hawks / Robinson Jeffers --
Love the wild swan / Robinson Jeffers --
Poetry / Marianne Moore --
Jouney of the magi / T.S. Eliot --
Sweeney among the nightingales / T.S. Eliot --
Morning song of senlin / T.S. Eliot --
At a concert of music / Conrad Aiken --
Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
On hearing a symphony of Beethoven / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
You, Andrew Marvell / Archibald MacLeish --
A hunger artist / Franz Kafka --
Ah, the distant land / Gottfried Benn --
This is the garden / E.E. Cummings --
Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias / Federico García Lorca --
A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway --
Homesick blues / Langston Hughes --
Saturday night / Langston Hughes --
Musée des Beaux Arts / W.H. Auden --
Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke --
I knew a woman / Theodore Roethke --
I think continually of those / Stephen Spender --
Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas --
In my craft or sullen art / Dylan Thomas --
Fern hill / Dylan Thomas --
from The plague / Albert Camus --
Hunters in the snow: Brueghel / Joseph Langland --
Falling asleep over the Aeneid / Robert Lowell --
Constantly risking absurdity / Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
from A Coney Island of the mind / Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
Babii yar / Yuvgeny Yevtushenko --
Parabolic ballad / Andrey Voznesensky --
Index.