Gods, heroes and monsters: the epic of Gilgamesh
War Adventure, Love: Homer, Sappho
Latin classics: Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal
Anglo-Saxon poetry: Beowulf, laments and riddles
Continental masters of the Middle Ages: Dante, Daniel, Petrarch, Villon
Poets of the seen world and the unseen: The Gawain poet, Hafez, Langland
Tudor court poets: Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser
Elizabethan love poets: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney
Copernicus in poetry: John Donne
An age of individualism: Jonson, Herrick, Marvell
Religious individuals: Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne
Poetry from the world beyond: John Milton
The Augustan age: Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith
The other Eighteenth Century: Montagu, Egerton, Finch, Tollet, Leapor, Yearsley, Barbauld, Blamire, Baillie, Wheatley, Duck ,Clare, Thomson, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, Smart
Communal poetry: popular ballads and hymns
Lyrical ballads, and after: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Second-generation Romantics: Keats and Shelley
Romantic eccentrics: Blake, Byron, Burns
From Romanticism to Modernism in German poetry: Goethe, Heine, Rilke
Making Russian literature: Pushkin, Lermontov
Great Victorians: Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold
Reform , resolve and religion: Victorian women poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti
American Revolutionaries: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson.
Shaking the foundation: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valery, Dylan Thomas, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Swinburne, Katharine Harris Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Charlotte Mew, Oscar Wilde
New voices at the end of an era: Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Hopkins
The Georgian poets: Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Davies, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, W.W. Gibson, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence
Poetry of the First World War: Stadler, Toller, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, Cole, Cannon, Sinclair, McCrae
The great escapist: W.B. Yeats
Inventing Modernism: Eliot, Pound
West meets East: Waley, Pound, the Imagists
American Modernists: Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Esther Popel, Helene Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes
Getting over Modernism: Auden, Spender, MacNeice
Poetry of the Second World War: Douglas, Lewis, Keyes, Fuller, Ross, Causley, Reed, Simpson, Shapiro, Wilbur, Jarrell, Pudney, Ewart, Sitwell, Feinstein, Stanley-Wrench, Clark
American confessional poets, and others: Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, Roethke
The movement poets and associates: Larkin, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Betjeman, Stevie Smith
Fatal attractions: Hughes, Plath
Poets in politics: Togore, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Brodsky, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Seferis,Seifert, Herbert, MacDiarmid, R.S. Thomas, Amichai
Poets who cross boundaries: Heaney, Walcott, Angelou, Oliver, Murray.
