Laurel · Every poet, by period

Seventeenth century

1620–1700 · 35 poets · 66,638 lines

The seventeenth century runs from the Cavalier lyric to the last great epic in the language. Herrick's short poems are a whole art of the small: a song to daffodils, a quatrain on Julia's voice, some fourteen hundred of them, many in the plain four-beat line. Lovelace, a royalist soldier, wrote the lyric that outlived the cause in a Westminster prison. Milton, who wrote for the other side in the civil war, set down subjects for an English epic in his early thirties, spent the twenty years after that on prose and the Commonwealth, and wrote Paradise Lost when they were over; he chose blank verse for it because rhyme, he said, was 'the invention of a barbarous age'.

Between them lies the change that defines the period: verse learning to argue. Milton's sentences run over the line ends for a dozen lines at a time; the reader is carried by syntax rather than by stanza, and the measured tools here show it plainly, with run-on lines in Paradise Lost at more than twice the library's average.

  1. John Milton 1608–1674L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and LycidasParadise LostParadise Regained
  2. Richard Lovelace 1617–1657Lucasta
  3. Richard Crashaw 1613–1649Steps to the Temple and Other Poems
  4. Thomas Traherne 1636–1674Poetical Works
  5. Robert Herrick 1591–1674Hesperides
  6. John Dryden 1631–1700PoemsThe Poetical Works, Volume I
  7. Edmund Waller 1606–1687Poetical Works
  8. Michael Wigglesworth 1631–1705The Day of Doom
  9. Thomas Stanley 1625–1678Original Lyrics
  10. John Wilmot Rochester 1647–1680The Works of the Earl of Rochester
  11. Andrew Marvell 1621–1678Poems
  12. Abraham Cowley 1618–1667Poems
  13. Henry Vaughan 1621–1695Poems
  14. Thomas Randolph 1605–1635Poems
  15. Sir John Suckling 1609–1642Poems
  16. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset 1638–1706Poems
  17. William Cartwright 1611–1643Poems
  18. William Habington 1605–1654Poems
  19. Thomas Heywood 1650Poems
  20. Jasper Mayne 1604–1672Poems
  21. Sir William Davenant 1606–1668Poems
  22. Sir Charles Sedley 1639–1701Poems
  23. Aphra Behn 1640–1689Poems
  24. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire 1649–1720Poems
  25. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose 1612–1650Poems
  26. Thomas Jordan 1612–1685Poems
  27. Alexander Brome 1620–1666Poems
  28. Charles Cotton 1630–1687Poems
  29. Sir George Etherege 1635–1691Poems
  30. Thomas Flatman 1637–1688Poems
  31. Katherine Philips 1631–1664Poems
  32. Sir Richard Fanshawe 1608–1666Poems
  33. John Bunyan 1628–1688Poems
  34. Thomas D’urfey 1653–1723Poems
  35. Thomas Otway 1652–1685Poems

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.