Poetry by Era
From Shakespeare's sonnets to the Modernists: each period of English-language poetry, with its dates, its defining poets and every poem we cover from it.
Renaissance
1500 – 1660 · 9 poemsShakespeare, Spenser and Marlowe. The age of the English sonnet, the love lyric and poems about time and beauty.
Metaphysical
1600 – 1690 · 7 poemsDonne, Marvell and Herbert: argument, wit and startling comparisons in poems about love, faith and death.
Romantic
1780 – 1837 · 46 poemsWordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats: nature, imagination, feeling and the rebel individual.
Victorian
1837 – 1901 · 44 poemsTennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti and Hardy: faith and doubt, duty, grief and the dramatic monologue.
Modernist
1900 – 1945 · 29 poemsEliot, Pound, Yeats and Frost: fragmented forms, free verse and the modern city.
War Poetry
1914 – 1918 · 1 poemOwen, McCrae and Brooke: the First World War from the trenches.
Harlem Renaissance
1918 – 1937 · 1 poemLangston Hughes, Claude McKay and the Black poets who remade American verse.