Literature
The following list is meant to be a collection of plays, novels, story collections, and poetry collections that can be read easily and quickly. Becoming aware of our great literary culture is beyond the scope of any one person's lifetime. However, I believe that these short(ish) works can help students, lit critters, and people become more connected to our literary history.
Plays
Many of these plays are in the public domain, so you can find digital copies for free. Many - if not all - of these plays have been made into movies. Many of the movie versions are masterpieces in their own right!
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
The Lion in Winter - James Goldman
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
The Iceman Cometh - Eugene O'Neill
Long Day's Journey Into Night - Eugene O'Neill
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
Tartuffe - Moliere
The Imaginary Invalid - Moliere
Betrayal - Harold Pinter
The Elephant Man - Bernard Pomerance
Twelve Angry Men - Reginald Rose
Amadeus - Peter Shaffer
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
Henry V - William Shakespeare
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Name Desire - Tennessee Williams
Poems
Each poem is hyperlinked to a copy of the poem. Resist the temptation to immediately seek explanation for the poem. THINK! Only after arriving at your own conclusion, seek the interpretations of others, but be ready to defend your own interpretations!
African American:
The Song of the Smoke - W.E.B. Du Bois
Miltonic Sonnets:
On His Blindness - John Milton
Scorn Not the Sonnet - William Wordsworth
Italian (Petrachan) Sonnets:
Death, Be Not Proud - John Donne
London, 1802 - William Wordsworth
Who will in fairest book of Nature know - Sir Philip Sidney
The Long Love that in my Thought Doth Harbor - Sir Thomas Wyatt
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why - Edna St. Vincent Millay
When I Consider How My Light is Spent - John Milton
Whoso List to Hunt - Sir Thomas Wyatt
I will Chaos into fourteen lines - Edna St. Vincent Millay
Old English:
Realism:
Sonnet 130 My Mistress' Eyes are nothing like the Sun - William Shakespeare
The White Man's Burden - Rudyard Kipling (warning, this poem is consider racist)
Romantics:
Hiawatha's Childhood - Henry Longfellow
I Hear America Singing - Walt Whitman
I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud - William Wordsworth
O Captain! My Captain! - Walt Whitman
Ode on a Grecian Urn - John Keats
Ode on Melancholy - John Keats
She Walks in Beauty - Lord Byron
The Apology - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Destruction of Sennacherib - Lord Byron
Naturalism:
Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind - Stephen Crane
The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy
The Ruined Maid - Thomas Hardy
Narrative:
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
Surrealism:
For The Union Dead - Robert Lowell
Confessional:
For my lover returning to his wife - Anne Sexton
Limerick:
There Was An Old poop From Poughkeeepsie - John Updike
Relativity - Arthur Henry Reginal Buller
Modern and Post-Modern:
Ex-Basketball Player - John Updike
War Poetry
It Feels a Shame to Be Alive - Emily Dickinson (US Civil War)