Laurel · Every poet, by period

Renaissance

1470–1640 · 58 poets · 126,621 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 1552–1599The Faerie Queene, Book I
  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 1524–1580The Lusiad
  11. John Skelton 1460–1529Poetical Works, Volume I
  12. John Davies 1569–1626The Complete Poems, Volume I
  13. Garcilaso de la Vega 1503–1536The Works of Garcilasso de la Vega
  14. Richard Corbet 1582–1635Poems
  15. Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475–1564Sonnets
  16. Nicholas Breton 1544–1626Pastoral Poems and Selected Poetry
  17. Ben Jonson 1573–1637Poems
  18. George Wither 1588–1667Poems
  19. John Fletcher 1579–1625Poems
  20. Thomas Campion 1567–1619Poems
  21. William Drummond, of Hawthornden 1585–1649Poems
  22. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester 1592–1669Poems
  23. Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503–1542Poems
  24. George Herbert 1593–1632Poems
  25. Alexander Hume 1560–1609Poems
  26. Thomas Lodge 1556–1625Poems
  27. Thomas Carew 1595–1639Poems
  28. William Browne, of Tavistock 1588–1643Poems
  29. Robert Greene 1560–1592Poems
  30. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 1516–1547Poems
  31. Sir Walter Raleigh 1552–1618Poems
  32. Alexander Montgomerie 1540–1610Poems
  33. Robert Southwell 1561–1595Poems
  34. Sir Robert Ayton 1570–1638Poems
  35. Thomas Nashe 1567–1601Poems
  36. Sir Henry Wotton 1568–1639Poems
  37. Giles Fletcher 1623Poems
  38. John Webster 1630Poems
  39. Richard Edwardes 1523–1566Poems
  40. George Gascoigne 1525–1577Poems
  41. James Shirley 1596–1666Poems
  42. George Peele 1558–1597Poems
  43. Richard Barnefield 1574–1627Poems
  44. John Lyly 1553–1606Poems
  45. Richard Rowlands 1565–1630Poems
  46. Francis Quarles 1592–1644Poems
  47. Thomas Dekker 1575–1641Poems
  48. Nicholas Grimald 1519–1562Poems
  49. Anthony Munday 1553–1633Poems
  50. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling 1580–1640Poems
  51. Francis Beaumont 1586–1616Poems
  52. George Chapman 1560–1634Poems
  53. Stephen Hawes 1523Poems
  54. Henry Constable 1562–1613Poems
  55. Mark Alexander Boyd 1563–1601Poems
  56. Joshua Sylvester 1563–1618Poems
  57. Robert Wever 1550Poems
  58. 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.