Laurel · Every poet, by period

Renaissance

1470–1640 · 61 poets · 136,231 lines

The Renaissance rediscovered the classical poets and set out to equal them in the modern tongues. Italy led: Ariosto and Tasso wrote romance epics in ottava rima, the eight-line stanza that Byron would later borrow for comedy; Camões did the same for Portugal's voyages. From Petrarch, by way of Wyatt and Surrey, came the sonnet, and by the 1590s every ambitious English poet was writing a sequence of them.

Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Donne are the English harvest. Spenser invented his nine-line stanza for a Protestant allegorical epic; Marlowe's blank verse gave the stage its 'mighty line'; Shakespeare's sonnets, in the English form of three quatrains and a couplet that Surrey had devised, turned the Petrarchan sonnet into something more argued and more personal; Donne broke the smooth line on purpose, with rhythms that follow speech and images drawn from compasses, maps and anatomy.

  1. William Shakespeare 1564–1616The SonnetsVenus and Adonis
  2. John Donne 1572–1631Poems
  3. Edmund Spenser c. 1552–1599The Faerie Queene, Book IAmoretti and Epithalamion, and Other Poems
  4. Christopher Marlowe 1564–1593Hero and Leander
  5. Philip Sidney 1554–1586Astrophel and Stella
  6. Samuel Daniel 1562–1619Delia, with Constable's Diana
  7. Michael Drayton 1563–1631Minor Poems
  8. Ludovico Ariosto 1474–1533Orlando Furioso
  9. Torquato Tasso 1544–1595Jerusalem Delivered
  10. Luís de Camões c. 1524–1580The Lusiad
  11. John Skelton c. 1460–1529Colyn Cloute, and Other Poems
  12. John Davies 1569–1626Orchestra, a Poem of Dancing, and Other Poems
  13. Garcilaso de la Vega 1503–1536The Works of Garcilasso de la Vega
  14. Miguel de Cervantes 1547–1616Journey to Parnassus
  15. Richard Corbet 1582–1635Poems
  16. Nicholas Breton 1544–c. 1626Pastoral Poems and Selected Poetry
  17. Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475–1564Sonnets
  18. Tommaso Campanella 1568–1639Sonnets
  19. Ben Jonson c. 1573–1637PoemsDiscoveries Made Upon Men and Matter and Some Poems
  20. Angelo Poliziano 1454–1494Orfeo
  21. George Wither 1588–1667Poems
  22. John Fletcher 1579–1625Poems
  23. Thomas Campion c. 1567–1619Poems
  24. William Drummond, of Hawthornden 1585–1649Poems
  25. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester 1592–1669Poems
  26. Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503–1542Poems
  27. George Herbert 1593–1632Poems
  28. Alexander Hume 1560–1609Poems
  29. Thomas Lodge c. 1556–1625Poems
  30. Thomas Carew c. 1595–c. 1639Poems
  31. William Browne, of Tavistock 1588–1643Poems
  32. Robert Greene 1560–1592Poems
  33. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 1516–1547Poems
  34. Sir Walter Raleigh c. 1552–1618Poems
  35. Alexander Montgomerie c. 1540–c. 1610Poems
  36. Robert Southwell 1561–1595Poems
  37. Sir Robert Ayton 1570–1638Poems
  38. Thomas Nashe 1567–1601Poems
  39. Sir Henry Wotton 1568–1639Poems
  40. Giles Fletcher 1623Poems
  41. John Webster c. 1630Poems
  42. Richard Edwardes 1523–1566Poems
  43. George Gascoigne c. 1525–1577Poems
  44. James Shirley 1596–1666Poems
  45. George Peele c. 1558–1597Poems
  46. Richard Barnefield 1574–1627Poems
  47. John Lyly 1553–1606Poems
  48. Richard Rowlands 1565–c. 1630Poems
  49. Francis Quarles 1592–1644Poems
  50. Thomas Dekker 1575–1641Poems
  51. Nicholas Grimald 1519–1562Poems
  52. Anthony Munday 1553–1633Poems
  53. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling c. 1580–1640Poems
  54. Francis Beaumont 1586–1616Poems
  55. George Chapman 1560–1634Poems
  56. Stephen Hawes 1523Poems
  57. Henry Constable c. 1562–c. 1613Poems
  58. Mark Alexander Boyd 1563–1601Poems
  59. Joshua Sylvester 1563–1618Poems
  60. Robert Wever c. 1550Poems
  61. Phineas Fletcher 1580–1650Poems

The periods are the ones the history track uses; a poet named in a period's own list belongs to it whatever the dates say.