Laurel · Every poet, by period

Seventeenth century

1620–1700 · 43 poets · 107,579 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 c. 1613–1649Steps to the Temple and Other Poems
  4. Thomas Traherne c. 1636–1674The Salutation, and Other Poems
  5. Robert Herrick 1591–1674Hesperides
  6. Jean de La Fontaine 1621–1695The Fables of La Fontaine
  7. Samuel Butler 1613–1680Hudibras
  8. Pedro Calderón de la Barca 1600–1681Life Is a DreamThe Wonder-Working MagicianThe Purgatory of St. Patrick
  9. John Dryden 1631–1700PoemsAbsalom and Achitophel, and Other Poems
  10. Edmund Waller 1606–1687Cooper's Hill, and Other Poems
  11. Molière 1622–1673Tartuffe; Or, The Hypocrite
  12. Michael Wigglesworth 1631–1705The Day of Doom
  13. Jean Racine 1639–1699Athaliah: A Tragedy
  14. Pierre Corneille 1606–1684Polyeucte
  15. Thomas Stanley 1625–1678Original Lyrics
  16. John Wilmot Rochester 1647–1680The Works of the Earl of Rochester
  17. Andrew Marvell 1621–1678Poems
  18. Abraham Cowley 1618–1667Poems
  19. Henry Vaughan 1621–1695Poems
  20. Thomas Randolph 1605–1635Poems
  21. Sir John Suckling 1609–1642Poems
  22. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset 1638–1706Poems
  23. William Cartwright 1611–1643Poems
  24. William Habington 1605–1654Poems
  25. Matsuo Bashō 1644–1694Bashō's Hokku
  26. Thomas Heywood 1650Poems
  27. Jasper Mayne 1604–1672Poems
  28. Sir William Davenant 1606–1668Poems
  29. Sir Charles Sedley 1639–1701Poems
  30. Anne Bradstreet 1612–1672Contemplations (extract)
  31. Aphra Behn 1640–1689Poems
  32. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire 1649–1720Poems
  33. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose 1612–1650Poems
  34. Thomas Jordan c. 1612–1685Poems
  35. Alexander Brome 1620–1666Poems
  36. Charles Cotton 1630–1687Poems
  37. Sir George Etherege 1635–1691Poems
  38. Thomas Flatman 1637–1688Poems
  39. Katherine Philips 1631–1664Poems
  40. Sir Richard Fanshawe 1608–1666Poems
  41. John Bunyan 1628–1688Poems
  42. Thomas D’urfey 1653–1723Poems
  43. 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.