This course surveys the poems of our language. From the Anglo-Saxon poems to the popular verse of Tennyson, the songs and the poets are legion: Chaucer, Raleigh, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herrick, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins. The England that nourished these writers will be viewed through their ballads, lyrics, sonnets, epigrams, and epics. “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”