An Anthology of Tudor and Elizabethan Poetry

(Poets born before 1576)

Introduction

The purpose of this site is to collect, in one place, links to all the Tudor and Elizabethan verse currently available on the web.  The site is still not complete--I am sure that there is material that I have missed, and I welcome additions and corrections from all and sundry.

For the writers who are currently included in Aniina Jokinen's Luminarium, the work has already been done, so I have simply included a link to the appropriate Luminarium page (followed by a link to the main Luminarium homepage for those who wish to do further browsing).  

For the poets not included in Luminarium, I have linked individually to all the poems I can find on the web.  I have not attempted to establish the quality or reliability of the texts, or to provide any critical apparatus for them--this "anthology" is simply a utilitarian set of connections to what happens to be publicly available online.  However, where possible I have tried to include at least one link to general background or biography on each poet.

• My original intention was to include writers who were active for a significant portion of their careers after 1485 and before 1603.
• Since the anthology's end-date was rather porous (an annoyingly large number of poets did not simply stop writing when Queen Elizabeth I died), I decided not to include writers who were born after 1575. This decision has created some anomalies, particularly with regard to "seventeenth-century" writers like Donne and Jonson, who were born before the cut-off date.
• I elected to exclude verse drama, but to include songs from plays where these were available as separate texts. This has also led to anomalies: John Marston, for instance, is included at the end of the period, but is represented only by four songs.

Organization

There are two tables of contents below: one is chronological by date of the poet's birth; the other is alphabetical by last name. Click on the poet's name to go to a listing of his/her poems. 

The alphabetical listing is slightly longer, since some poets are listed under alternative designations (e.g., "Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey" is listed under both "Howard" and "Surrey"). There is also a full chronological TOC available for browsing; it lists all poets and their poems in a single file, but this file is fairly large (185K) and may take some time to download.

Sources

A complete listing of sites for the poems and background material is available on the Links to Sources page.

Tables of Contents