The HyperTexts

Free Verse Timeline and Chronology

This is a timeline of English free verse, from the earliest Celtic, Gaelic, Druidic, Anglo-Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman works, to the present day. All dates are AD or CE (current era) unless otherwise specified. Some dates are approximations or "educated guesses." Considerable information was extracted from wiki and other public web pages (we do not claim everything here to be stunningly original). You can click on any hyperlinked poem title or writer name to "drill down." If you're looking for something in particular, you can use your browser's search function or CTRL-F to find a keyword. If you're a student who "doesn't like poetry" and is only here grudgingly because of a school assignment, please reconsider. Do you like music: pop, rock, country, bluegrass, folk, traditional, hymns, r&b, hip-hop, rap, soul, blues, jazz, classical and/or opera? If so, the vast majority of all such songs are poems set to music. So unless you dislike all the words of every song you have ever heard, you really do like some poetry, after all! ;-)

Our top ten English language free verse poets are: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. But often the poetic lines blur and bards like William Blake, Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Wyatt and William Butler Yeats seem to have been writing free (or freer) verse even when employing meter and rhyme.

The names of the major writers and events either bolded or hyperlinked. Dates related specifically to free verse, rather than to poetry or writing in general, are preceded by an asterisk (*).

The Phases of English Poetry (the main periods are underlined and bolded)

5600 BC — Rising seas separate England from the European mainland; consequently the natives' language begins to evolve separately from its continental peers ...
3000 BC — The first smaller henges are dug out locally at Stonehenge but native Britons remain prehistoric, lacking any writing. Songs and poems are passed down orally.
1268 BC — Possible date for early Celtic poems such as the Song of Amergin, but dating orally-transmitted works of the Prehistoric Period (?-55 BC) is a highly speculative endeavor!
55 BC — Julius Caesar invades England; the Anglo-Roman Period (55 BC-410 AD) makes Latin the primary language of rulers, clergy and scholars. Native poetry remains oral.
410 — Rome is sacked by Visigoths; the Roman legions no longer occupy and defend England. Germanic tribes invade, beginning the Anglo-Saxon or Old English Period (410-1066).
449 — Anglo-Saxons under Hengist and Horsa invade England after the Roman legions leave. England will take its name from the Angles as the lingo becomes more Germanic.
658 — Caedmon's Hymn, the oldest authenticated English poem, marks the beginning of English poetry (although it was Anglo-Saxon and thus heavily Germanic at the time).
680 — Possible date for the epic poem Beowulf, a masterpiece of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. The tale is set in the late fifth century but may have been composed later.
871 — King Alfred the Great unites the Anglo-Saxons, defeats the Danes and becomes the first king of a united England. He was also a notable scholar, writer and translator.
*890 — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the first comprehensive attempt at an English history. Such prose, like most modern free verse, lacks regular meter and rhyme.
950 — The Exeter Book contains the first English poems likely written by women, Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament, the first rhyming poem and Anglo-Saxon riddles/kennings.
1066 — William the Conqueror wins the Battle of Hastings; this Norman Conquest begins the Anglo-Norman or Middle English Period (1066-1340). French and Latin rule.
1000 — Now skruketh rose and lylie flour is one of the earliest and best English love poems, circa the 11th century AD. The English language is slowly modernizing.
1154 — The Plantagenet Period (1154-1485) was primarily political and because the Plantagenets were Normans, we will mark our next period by a different kind of coronation, in 1340 ...
1200 — How Long the Night ("Myrie it is while sumer ylast") is a stellar rhyming poem of the Middle English period; it remains largely understandable to modern readers; also the first Ballads.
1215 — The Magna Carta, drafted in French, forces King John to grant liberties and rights to Englishmen in return for taxation. French and Latin remain the choice for nobles and scholars.
1260 — Early rhyming poems include Sumer is icumen in, Fowles in the Frith, Ich am of Irlaunde ("I am of Ireland"), Now Goeth Sun Under Wood, Pity Mary, and Alison.
*1320 — Birth of John Wycliffe, the first important translator of the Bible into English. His translations of the Psalms may be the first example of English free verse.
*1340 — Birth of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first major vernacular English poet and the first to mention free (or freer) verse. Thus begins the Late Middle English Period (1340-1503).
1350 — Around this time there is an Alliterative Revival, led by the Gawain/Pearl poet with poems like Piers Plowman, Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness.
*1380 — The John Wycliffe translation of the Psalms has been cited as free verse that predates the King James Bible.
*1380 — Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame may contain an early reference to free, or freer, verse.
1430 — A "haunting riddle-chant" from this era is I Have a Yong Suster ("I Have a Young Sister"), a Medieval English riddle-poem described as a popular song and a folk song.
*1455 — The Guttenberg Bible is the first book printed with moveable type. Printed books would lead to an explosion of knowledge and allow education to advance around the world.
1476 — William Caxton prints Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Other than the poetry of the Bible, this is the first printing of a major English poetic work.
1485 — The Tudor Period (1457-1603) ends the Middle Ages; English rules over French, finally! But we'll mark our next period by the birth of the first modern English poet ...
1492 — Columbus discovers San Salvador and the Americas. William Dunbar writes court poetry for James IV of Scotland.
*1503 — Birth of Thomas Wyatt; he and Henry Howard help introduce the English Renaissance or Early Modern English Period (1503-1558).
*1516 — Birth of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, whose invention of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) was a step toward modern free verse.
*1525 — William Tyndale is working on his English translation of the New Testament, possibly in Wittenberg (where Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation).
1532 — The English Reformation Period (1532-1649) was more religious/political than poetic, but John Milton was a major voice for reform while Cavalier poets supported the king.
1532 — Birth of Edmund Spenser. He would single-handedly create the modern English style of poetry: "fluid," "limpid," "translucent" and "graceful," while introducing humanism.
*1534 — Around this time, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard introduce the English sonnet and blank verse. Blank verse would create a sort of "foundation" for free verse.
*1535 — The first complete English translation of the Bible, including psalms and other poetry, is created by Miles Coverdale.
1558 — The Elizabethan Period (1558-1603) was incredibly fertile, with major works by Spenser, Ralegh, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.
1564 — Birth of William Shakespeare, one of the world's greatest poets, playwrights and songwriters. He is justly famous for Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and other major works.
1572 — Birth of John Donne, the first and most prominent of the Metaphysical school of poets (1572-1695), which included George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughn.
1579 — Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender has been called "the first work of the English literary Renaissance." With his liquid rhythms Spenser influenced the modern English poetic style.
*1580 — Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy mixes blank verse, rhymed verse and prose.
*1587 — Christopher Marlowe is the first major English playwright to employ metrically flexible blank verse, a precursor to free verse.
*1590 — William Shakespeare also mixes blank verse, rhymed verse and prose in his plays. His first play may have been Henry VI, Part I.
1591 — Birth of Robert Herrick, first of the Cavalier poets (1591-1674), who included Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling and Thomas Carew. They were called the "tribe of Ben [Jonson]."
1603 — The Jacobean/Caroline/Interregnum/Restoration Period (1603-1690) sees the King James Bible, Shakespeare's later plays, and major works by John Milton.
*1611 — The King James Bible is published in still-readable English. It contains some of the earliest and best free verse in the English language, such as the Psalms and Song of Solomon.
1608 — Birth of John Milton, generally considered to be the second-greatest English poet, after Shakespeare. He is best known for his epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
1620 — The Pilgrims set sail for America in the Mayflower. Harold Bloom has called Tom O'Bedlam's Song "all but High Romantic vision," which would put it two hundred years ahead of its time!
*1671 — John Milton's Samson Agonistes has been cited as free verse due to its varying line lengths and irregular rhymes.
*1656 —  Abraham Cowley's Pindarique Odes have been called free verse.
1690 — The Augustan Period (1690-1756) features sophisticated work by poets like Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift. (But it seems like a dry spell today.)
1742 — Thomas Gray begins writing his masterpiece, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It may have been the first major work of English Romanticism.
1750 — Edward Young's melancholic Night-Thoughts, later illustrated by William Blake in 1797, would become a major influence on Romantics to follow, including Blake and Goethe.
1752 — Birth of Thomas Chatterton, called the "marvellous boy" by William Wordsworth. Although he died at age seventeen, Chatterton has been called the first Romantic poet.
*1757 — Birth of William Blake, a major poet of the English Romantic Period (1757-1837) and a writer of free verse.
*1759 — Christopher Smart writes Jubilate Agno around this time while confined to a mental asylum; it is an early free verse poem about his cat Jeoffry.
1776 — American colonists defiantly declare independence with words written in ringing iambic pentameter by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin: "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."
1789 — The French Revolution influences English Romantic poets: William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.
*1790 — William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell breaks from what he called the "monotonous cadence" of English verse and which Ezra Pound later termed the "metronome."
1798 — Lyrical Ballads, written primarily by William Wordsworth with a few poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, becomes the foundational text of the English Romantic Movement.
*1819 — John Keats publishes Ode to a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale. Lord Byron publishes Don Juan. Birth of the great American free verse poet Walt Whitman.
*1830 — Alfred Tennyson publishes his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Emily Dickinson, generally considered to be the greatest female American poet, is born. Her poetry would be free-ish.
1836 — Ralph Waldo Emerson is a founder of the Transcendental Club, which includes Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott.
1837 — The Victorian Period (1837-1901) is led by Lord Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Clare, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
1848 — The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1882) is founded by the poet/artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti; aligned poets include Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
*1855 — Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass, a landmark work of Early Modernism (1855-1901) that rocks the Victorians to their whalebone corsets! Emily Dickinson is writing. 
*1867 — Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, first published in 1867 but probably written around 1850, has been called a masterpiece of Early Modernism.
*1880 — Vers Libre ("free verse") develops in France and will be adopted by English poets around 1909-1912, initially through the English movement called Imagism.
*1888 — T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential Modernist poet and critic, is born. He writes free verse. Columbia Records, the first major American record label, is founded.
*1890 — Fin-de-siècle (1890-1900) poets who took notes from the French symbolists include William Butler Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde and Swinburne.
1901 — The Edwardian/Georgian Period (1901-1936) features Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas and Walter de la Mare.
1895 — Scott Joplin publishes ragtime compositions. Buddy Bolden creates the countermelody of jazz. The world will soon be awash in poems set to music: pop, country, blues, etc.
1903 — Wilbur and Orville Wright fly the first airplane at Kitty Hawk. "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus is mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
*1908 — Ezra Pound leaves America for London. Pound publishes A Lume Spento. In England, he would become the leading apostle of Vers Libre, or free verse.
*1909 — Two poems published by T. E Hulme are considered the beginning of the modernist movement called Imagism (1909-1919); its leading poet-critics would be Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
*1912 — Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and H. D. (Hilda Doolitle) meet and decide to form a movement called Imagism. Pound uses the term Imagiste for the first time.
*1912 — Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine. She makes Ezra Pound a London correspondent for the influential journal, helping the Imagist movement.
*1914 — Ezra Pound publishes Des Imagistes, the first Imagist anthology. He also helps an unknown James Joyce publish Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
*1914 — Ezra Pound quickly becomes dissatisfied with the work of other Imagists and founds a new movement called Vorticism (1913-1918), but it does not take off with the public.
*1917 — Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot publicly denounce the "general floppiness" of free verse poets like Amy Lowell (the "Amygism") and Edgar Lee Masters (the "Lee Masterism").
*1922 — The writing of free verse does, however, take off. J. Isaacs called it the "Great Poetry Boom," with around 1,000 poets producing around 2,000 books from 1912-1922.
*1922 — T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land, a long poem that cannot be read aloud because it is written in English, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German and Sanskrit!
*1922 — William Carlos Williams calls The Waste Land a "catastrophe" and recommends "rediscovery of a primary impetus." And perhaps something readable?
*1923 — By this time e. e. cummings was taking liberties with English grammar and punctuation in his poetry collection Tulips and Chimneys. After all, rules were made to be broken!
*1923 — Wallace Stevens publishes his exquisite "Sunday Morning" and other marvelous poems in Harmonium.
*1925 — Amy Lowell wins the Pulitzer Prize. In Nashville the Grand Ole Opry begins radio broadcasts.
*1926 — Birth of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), the author of Howl and perhaps the greatest and most influential of the Beat poets. Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues.
*1932 — William Carlos Williams laments the state of the art: "Free verse—if it ever existed—is out." But apparently thousands of penners of bad free verse did not get the word.
*1933 — Archibald MacLeish wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Poems should not mean, but simply be!
*1945 — Ezra Pound was to be tried for treason for questionable activities during WWII, but he was found to be insane and committed to a psychiatric ward.
*1950 — Charles Olson calls Pound and other Imagists "inferior predecessors" and creates a new school of poetry, Projectivism (1950-1950), which also does not take off.
*1948 — T. S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize. W. H. Auden wins the Pulitzer Prize. Leonie Adams is appointed Poet Laureate. Allen Ginsberg has his "auditory vision" of William Blake.
*1951 — Carl Sandburg wins the Pulitzer Prize. Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed uses the term "rock 'n' roll." Muddy Waters is the king of the blues singers.
*1945 — Ezra Pound is released from the mental ward and returns to Italy, where he resumes work on his Cantos.
*1963 — William Carlos Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1969 — Woodstock features folk poets like Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Crosby, Stills and Nash beside rock poets like John Fogerty, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
*1972 — The earliest "rap" musical events are held in the Bronx.
1973 — Great Britain joins the European Union. Daniel Hoffman is appointed Poet Laureate. An estimated one billion viewers watch Elvis Presley's Aloha from Hawaii.
*1974 — Robert Lowell wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Stanley Kunitz is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. The debut of disco music.
1975 — Queen releases the single "Bohemian Rhapsody" which features surreal, ultra-modernistic lyrics. Bruce Springsteen is the reigning rock poet with "Born to Run."
1976 — Robert Hayden is appointed Poet Laureate. Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art." James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.
1977 — The movie Saturday Night Fever popularizes disco and makes the Bee Gees major stars. Elvis Presley dies. 
1978 — William Meredith is appointed Poet Laureate. Sony introduces the Walkman and the concept of personal, portable music. The debut of hip-hop music and Soul Train.
1979 — The Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper's Delight" is the first rap/hip-hop song/poem to reach the Billboard's Top 40. Robert Penn Warren wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1980 — Blondie has the first white rap/hip-hop hit with "Rapture."
1981 — Maxine Kumin is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. MTV debuts with innovative music videos.
1982 — Sylvia Plath wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collected poems. Anthony Hecht is appointed Poet Laureate. Michael Jackson's Thriller is the biggest-selling album of all time.
*1982 — The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, based on poems written by T. S. Eliot, becomes the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
1983 — Compact discs begin to replace vinyl records. Madonna has her first hits with "Holiday," "Borderline" and "Lucky Star." Michael Jacksons moonwalks.
1985 — Gwendolyn Brooks is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Freddy Mercury and Queen steal the show at Live Aid.
1986 — President Ronald Reagan borrows lines from the James Magee Jr. poem "High Flight" in his Oval Office address to comfort a grieving nation following the Challenger disaster.
1987 — Joseph Brodsky wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Richard Wilbur is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.
1988 — Howard Nemerov is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for the second time. Michael Jackson buys a ranch and calls it Neverland.
1989 — Richard Wilbur wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1990 — Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mark Strand is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.
1991 — Nirvana's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," makes grunge cool. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, dies from complications of AIDS.
1992 — Derek Walcott wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mona Van Duyn is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.
1993 — Maya Angelou, the great granddaughter of an Arkansas slave, reads "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration. Rita Dove is appointed Poet Laureate.
1995 — Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature; Philip Levine wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Simple Truth. Robert Hass is appointed Poet Laureate.
1996 — Rap poet Eminem releases his debut album, Infinite.
1997 — Robert Pinksy is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Elton John sings "Candle In The Wind" with revised lyrics for the funeral of Princess Diana in Westminster Abby.
1999 — Gunter Grass, a German poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
2000 — Stanley Kunitz is appointed Poet Laureate for the second time. The Internet begins to transform music, poetry and art.
2001 — Following the September 11th attacks, poems are pinned to makeshift memorials and circulate on the internet. Apple releases the iPod, a portable MP3 player.
2003 — Louise Gluck is appointed Poet Laureate. Apple introduces its iTunes online store.
2004 — Ted Kooser is appointed Poet Laureate.
2005 — Ted Kooser wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
2006 — Donald Hall is appointed Poet Laureate.
2007 — Charles Simic is appointed Poet Laureate.
2008 — Kay Ryan is appointed Poet Laureate.
2009 — W. S. Merwin wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Michael Jackson dies in the middle of his comeback tour.
2010 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Versed by Rae Armantrout. W. S. Merwin is appointed Poet Laureate.
2011 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Kay Ryan. Philip Levine is appointed Poet Laureate.
2012 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars. Natasha Trethewey is appointed Poet Laureate.
2013 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap.
2014 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Vijay Seshadri for 3 Sections. Charles Wright is appointed Poet Laureate.
2015 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Gregory Pardlo for Digest.
2016 — Great Britain leaves the European Union in a movement known as "Brexit." Donald Trump is elected president of the United States in a shocking upset.
2017 — Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, buys a majority stake in The Atlantic.

The leading voices of Modernism and Postmodernism (1901-Present) include poets such as William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilfred Owen, e. e. cummings, Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. We would also include outstanding singer-songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Woody Guthrie, Michael Jackson, Carole King, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, Prince, Smokey Robinson, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Hank Williams Sr. Of course there are many other worthy names―too many to mention them all here. So anyone who says that poetry is "dead" or "dying" is obviously just not listening! Phases and schools of poetry in modern times include Imagism (Pound, Eliot), Vorticism (Pound), Projectivism (Olson), Cubism (cummings), Confessionalism (Lowell, Plath, Anne Sexton), New Romanticism (Dylan Thomas), The Beats (Allen Ginsberg), New Formalism (Richard Wilbur), Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism, Orphism, Purism, Dadism, Constructivism, and other -isms too numerous (and obscure) to name!

Now begins our more comprehensive history of English free verse, with a considerable smattering of prose, music and the other arts ...

Prehistoric or Pre-History Art (all dates are BCE; some are "educated guesses")
2,500,000 BC — Homo Habilis is the first human ancestor to create stone tools; thus begins the Stone Age and the Lower Paleolithic Era, in which human beings are still evolving and use very simple, crude stone tools.
170,000 — Humans begin to wear clothing, but nothing too stylish yet ... the emergence of clothing, intentional burials and possible concepts of an afterlife religion mark the Middle Paleolithic Era.
133,000 — Neanderthals had fashion sense, as jewelry made from eagle talons has been discovered at a Neanderthal cave at Krapina, Croatia.
108,000 — Beads made from shells of Nassarius sea snails, found at the Skhul cave in Israel, are the first known jewelry made by modern humans, who are finally catching up to Neanderthals!
68,000 — Stones with crosshatch markings found at the Blombos cave in South Africa may be the first examples of abstract or symbolic art. The Middle Paleolithic Era concludes with modern human behavior.
40,000 — Paleolithic flutes made from bones and mammoth ivory, discovered in a German cave, appear to be the oldest musical instruments. Increasing organization and advancing art mark the Upper Paleolithic Era.
39,000 — The Altamira Cave cave paintings, near El Castillo, Spain, may be the earth's oldest paintings and the earliest carbon-dated examples of human figurative art.
38,000 — The Löwenmensch figurine, aka the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, and the Venus of Hohle Fels may be the earth's oldest statues.
26,000 — The earliest known pottery was used not as crockery, but for art: the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, Moravia (in the modern-day Czech Republic).
21,000 — Evidence of the seeding, cultivation and grinding of grains at the Ohalo II settlement in Israel pushes back the dawn of human agriculture yet again.
10,000 — The first permanent human settlements and the emergence of full-scale agriculture and domesticated animals like sheep and goats pave the way for more advanced forms of art to come ...

Our top ten ancient and classical era poets: Enheduanna, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Simonides, Sophocles, Pindar, Archilochus, Homer, Sappho

Pre-English Art (all dates are BCE; some are "educated guesses")
5600 — Previously, human beings could walk to England because it was a peninsula of Europe! But rising sea levels due to massive ice melts create an island with around 5,000 stranded hunter-gatherers.
5000 — The inventions of the wheel, the kiln, smelting (tin, lead and copper) and proto-writing set the stage for the coming Bronze Age and the dawn of poetry and other forms of literature.
3500 — The Stone Age winds down and the Bronze Age revs up as metal tools and weapons begin to predominate; nations develop; writing develops in Sumer (Iraq); thus begins what we call "history."
3000 — Sumerian temple hymns and laments; Egyptian pyramid and coffin texts (early epigrams/epitaphs); invention of paper (papyrus); the first smaller henges are dug out locally at Stonehenge.
2700 — The Egyptian physician Merit-Ptah appears to be the first woman named in the field of medicine, and perhaps all of science. Her portrait appears in a tomb in the Valley of Kings.
2690 — A seal from the tomb of Seth-Peribsen has the first known complete sentence: "The golden one of Ombos has unified the two realms for his son, the king of Lower and Upper Egypt, Peribsen."
2650 — The Egyptian polymath Imhotep has been called the original architect, engineer and physician; he designed the first pyramid, was promoted to a god, and ended up being worshipped by a cult!
2500 — The Sumerian Kesh Temple Hymn and Instructions of Šuruppak may be the earth's oldest surviving literature. Work begins on the mammoth henges of Stonehenge and on the Great Sphinx of Giza.
2285 — Enheduanna, daughter of King Saragon the Great, may be the first named poet in human history and the first known writer of prayers and hymns such as The Exaltation of Inanna.
2100 — The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh appears to be the earth's oldest extant major poem.
2000 — The earth's oldest love poem appears to be the ancient Sumerian poem The Love Song of Shu-Sin. Early Minoan culture on Crete. The first libraries in Egypt. Abraham of Ur becomes a monotheist.
1500 — The Rigveda, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, may be the oldest religious text still in use today.
1400 — A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit includes the first musical score. Composed for the lyre, it records the oldest playable melody. The first written legal codes are those of Hammurabi.
1200 — The Bronze Age evolves into the Iron Age. Iron artifacts dating to around this time or earlier have been found in Anatolia (modern Turkey), Egypt, Jordan, Sumer (Iraq) and Greece.
1000 — Early Native American poetry such as Mayan and Aztec; early Oriental poetry; possible date for the birth of Homer, author of the epic poems Odyssey and Iliad; the Iron Age begins; Hebrew Song of Deborah.
750 — Birth of Hesiod; Celts reach England; Hebrew proverbs and prophets; oldest Chinese poems in the Shi Jing; Lycurgus of Sparta; first Olympic games; Rome is founded; Nineveh has a library with 22,000 clay tablets.
600 — The births of Archilochus (680), Solon (640), Sappho of Lesbos (630), Aesop (620), Lao-tse (604), Anacreon (582), Buddha (563), Confucius (551), Aeschylus (525), Pindar (522).
500 — Possible date for the Bible's Song of Solomon and the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The births of Pericles (500), Sophocles (497), Euripides (484), Socrates (470), Plato (428), Aristotle (384).
484 — Aeschylus wins first prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia in Athens. Sophocles wins in 468, Euripides in 441, Aristophanes in 425. Talk about tough competition!
100 — The births of Julius Caesar (100), Lucretius (99), Cato the Younger (95), Catullus (84), Virgil (70), Horace (65), Plutarch (47), Ovid (43), Martial (43), Lucan (39), Paul of Tarsus (5), Seneca the Younger (4).
37 — Virgil's reputation is established by his Eclogues.
23 — The first three books of Horace's Odes are published.
16 — A collection of witty erotic love poems, Amores, brings Ovid success while still in his twenties. 

The Celtic Period (?-1 BC)
The Celtic period begins in the distant past and extends to the Roman invasions of Britain that began under Julius Caesar in 55 BC. The most famous poem of this period is the "Song of Amergin" although it is not at all certain when or where the poem was composed, or even who composed it. This poem has been ascribed to Amergin, a Milesian Druid who allegedly settled in Ireland, perhaps centuries before the birth of Christ.

1268 — The Song of Amergin remains a mystery. It was written by an unknown poet at an unknown time at an unknown location. The date given here was furnished by Robert Graves, who translated the Song of Amergin in his influential book The White Goddess (1948). Graves remarked that “English poetic education should, really, begin not with Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin.” The first native language of the Celtic Britons has given us relatively few English words, such as: beak, brat, bog, clan, clout, crock, dad, daddy, dam, doe, knob, nook, slogan, whisky, etc. (with some Celtic words being passed along later, via Scottish, Irish and Welsh influences).

60 — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first comprehensive history of the Anglo-Saxons, which was initially composed during the reign of King Alfred the Great, has the year 60 BC as its first dated entry, and describes what happened quite accurately, saying that Gaius Julius crushed the Britons but was unable to establish any empire there. And the date was correct to within five years.

55 — The Roman General Julius Caesar invades England, creating a beachhead on the coast of Kent. At this time the primary language of the native Britons is a Celtic dialect known as Brittonic. The Britons had no form of writing at the time, so in that sense they remained prehistoric and their poetry was oral. The following year, 54 BC, Julius Caesar invades again, this time using diplomacy to bring England within the Roman sphere of influence, but conquering no territory and leaving no Roman troops behind. However, Latin would become the language of business, commerce and international politics. English words of Latin origin include: antenna, capitulate, criminal, decimal, embrace, equestrian, etc. According to research done by AskOxford, around 33% of English words have Latin or Greeks roots, so the Roman influence has been far-reaching.

34 — Caesar Augustus plans invasions of England in 34 BC, 27 BC and 25 BC, but apparently always finds more important things to do. Diplomacy and trade continue, but Rome has its eye set on conquest ...

Romano-British Period (1 AD-449 AD)
The Roman conquest of Britain began in AD 43, during the reign of the Emperor Claudius. Following the subjugation of native Britons, a distinctive Romano-British culture emerged under a provincial government, which, despite steadily extended territorial control northwards, was never able to control Caledonia (Scotland). The Romans demarcated the northern border of Britannia with Hadrian's Wall, completed around the year 128. Fourteen years later, in 142, the Romans extended the Britannic frontier northwards, to the Forth-Clyde line, where they constructed the Antonine Wall, but after approximately twenty years they retreated to the border of Hadrian's Wall. Around the year 197, Rome divided Britannia into two provinces, Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior. Some time after 305, Britannia was further divided and made into an imperial diocese. For much of the later period of the Roman occupation, Britannia was subject to barbarian invasions and often came under the control of imperial usurpers and pretenders to the Roman Emperorship. By the end of the Romano-British period, it seems that Roman rule was seen as more of a liability than a bonus by the natives.

9 — The seemingly invincible Roman legions suffer their bloodiest defeat in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and suddenly don't seem so invincible, after all ...

26 — Pontius Pilate is appointed Prefect of Judea, where another revolution is percolating.

28 — John the Baptist is executed by Herod Antipas in Judaea.

32 — Jesus Christ is crucified in Jerusalem. The Christian religion will have tremendous implications for England and its natives.

43 — Emperor Claudius invades England and Roman rule is established. The Roman city of Londinium (London) is established.

56 — Birth of Tacitus (c.56 - c.120), whose Latin histories would be a primary source of historical information about Briton and the early Britons, who at that time did not have any writing in their native languages. Tacitus would favorably contrast the liberty of native Britons with the tyranny and corruption of the Roman Empire.

60 — ABCs written on a wood and wax tablet found in London suggest that a school may have existed there soon after the Roman conquest. There is also evidence that a Roman general named Agricola encouraged his children to go to school a decade or two later.

70 — Destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions of Titus.

122 — The Roman Emperor Hadrian visits England. Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins. Resistance to Roman rule continues in England and other hot spots.

368 — Attacks by Picts and Saxons force the Romans to abandon Hadrian's Wall. By this time the use of vulgar Latin begins to die out in England. Germanic influences due to the invasions of Angles, Saxons and Jutes will increasingly influence the development of the "local lingo." Roman records reveal that Germanic troops were stationed on Hadrian's Wall, so by this time the influx of Germanic tribes had apparently begun. The trickle would soon become a tide ...

383 — Magnus Maximus, the Roman general assigned to Britain, launches a successful bid for imperial power, crossing over to Gaul with his troops. He rules Gaul and Britain as Augustus. The year 383 is the last date for any evidence of a major Roman military presence in Britain. The withdrawal of most of the Roman legions was an invitation for invasions of Britain by Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and by the neighboring Picts and Scotti.

407 — Constantine rallies the remaining Roman troops in Britain, leads them across the Channel into Gaul, and establishes himself as the Western Roman Emperor. Romano-Britons, now without Roman troops for protection and having suffered particularly severe Saxon raids in 408 and 409, would expel Constantine's magistrates in 409 or 410. The Byzantine historian Zosimus blamed Constantine for the expulsion, saying that he had allowed the Saxons to raid, and that the Britons and Gauls were reduced to such straits that they revolted from the Roman Empire, rejected Roman law, reverted to their native customs, and armed themselves to ensure their safety.

410 — Rome is sacked by the Visigoths under King Alaric. Alaric dies shortly thereafter, but the vaunted Roman Empire is falling apart. Emperor Honorius replies to a request by Romano-Britons for assistance with the Rescript of Honorius, which instructed them to see to their own defense.

430 — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says "This year [430] Patricius [Saint Patrick] was sent from Pope Celestinus to preach baptism to the Scots." Patrick's Confessio (Confession), written in Latin, survives.

444 — The Huns unite under Attila and he, too, sets his sights on Rome. Eight years later, in 452, Attila invades Italy as far as the River Po.

Our top ten early medieval era poets: Amergin, Caedmon, Bede, Cynewulf, King Alfred the Great, Deor, Ono no Komachi, Omar Khayyám, the authors of Beowulf and Wulf and Eadwacer (the latter in all likelihood a female poet)

Anglo-Saxon or Old English Period (449-1066)
Only four Anglo-Saxon poets are known by name with any degree of certainty: Caedmon, Bede, Cynewulf and King Alfred the Great. The most ancient Old English poetry is actually Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic. The Angles and Saxons were Germanic tribes who migrated to England. (The name England derives from "Angle Land.") The Anglo-Saxon era begins with the withdrawal of Roman troops from England, and ends with the Norman conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066.

449 — Around this time Anglo-Saxons begin to invade England with considerable success, helped by the absence of the Roman legions.

480 — Boethius is born in Rome around 480 AD. His book The Consolation of Philosophy would greatly influence early English poets like John Gower.

500 — Birth of Gildas (c.500-570), perhaps the first notable English writer we know by name (although he was born in Scotland and wrote in Latin). Latin remains the language of the elites and scholars.

521 — Birth of Saint Columba (521–597), an Irish abbot and missionary to Scotland who founded the important abbey on Iona. Three early medieval Latin hymns may be attributed to Columba.

596 — Augustine leaves Rome as a missionary to England; he becomes the first Archbishop of Canterbury and baptizes Ethelbert of Kent, the first English king to convert to Christianity.

620 — Vikings begin invasions of Ireland.

627 — Birth of Adomnán (c.627–704) whose most important work is the Vita Columbae, a hagiography of Columba, the first biography written in Britain, and the most important surviving work written in early medieval Scotland.

634 — The monastery at Lindisfarne is founded by Saint Aidan on what came to be called the Holy Isle. Also the birth of Cuthbert, who would become Bishop of Lindisfarne (see the entry for 685).

639 — Birth of Aldhelm (c.639-709), an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat, scholar, abbot and bishop of the Canterbury school. Aldhelm composed "enigmas" or riddles in Latin.

657 — Creation of the first English monastery, Whitby Abbey. Saint Hilda was the founding Abbess. The early abbeys and monasteries became centers of literacy and education. Hilda is considered one of the patron saints of learning and culture, including poetry, due to her patronage of Cædmon (see the entry for 658).

658 — Caedmon's Hymn, the first English poem still extant today, marks the beginning of what came to be known as English poetry. According to the Venerable Bede, Caedmon was an illiterate herdsman of the Whitby monastery who was given the gift of poetic composition by an angel.

664 — The Synod of Whitby (a council meeting at which decisions about local religious practices were determined). Whitby aligns with the Roman Catholic Church. This heralds a decline of the Celtic Church, and the ascendency of the Roman Catholic Church, in England. Because the church was a center of education and literacy, this would have a major impact on the evolution of English literature and poetry.

673 — Birth of Bede (c.672-735), the great English scholar/poet/historian who came to be known as the Venerable Bede and the "Father of English History."

680 — Possible date for the composition of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and the shorter poem Widsith, the "Far Traveler." The unknown author of Beowulf was presumably a minstrel, as he mentions reciting his "hall-entertainment" to the music of a harp.

685 — Cuthbert becomes Bishop of Lindisfarne. An anonymous life of Cuthbert written at Lindisfarne may be the oldest extant piece of English historical writing. Written just after or possibly contemporarily with Adomnán's Vita Columbae, the Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c. 699–705) is the first piece of Northumbrian Latin writing and the earliest piece of English Latin hagiography.

700 — Cynewulf pens and signs four Anglo-Saxon poems: Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles and Juliana.

735 — Bede's Death Song may have been written on his deathbed.

829 — King Egbert of Wessex is described as a bretwalda, meaning "wide-ruler" or "Britain-ruler." Thus, Egbert may have been the first king of a united Anglo-Saxon England.

830 — Ono no Komachi wrote tanka (also known as waka), a traditional form of Japanese lyric poetry that, along with haiku, would influence English modernists like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

842 — Vikings raid London, Rochester, and Southampton.

849 — The birth of King Alfred the Great (c. 849-899), who would be a writer and translator of note, as well as one of England's greatest kings (as his appellation suggests). Alfred was one of the first known writers of English prose.

871 — Alfred the Great unites the Anglo-Saxons, defeats the Danes and becomes the first king of a united England.

875 — Norsemen attack Paris, are eventually awarded Normandy and become known as the Normans (who would later invade and conquer England under William the Conqueror).

890 — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the first comprehensive attempt at an English history. It has been called "the single most important source for the history of England in Anglo-Saxon times."

899 — Death of King Alfred the Great.

900 — Deor, a scop, is writing poems such as Deor's Lament.

950 — Four early poetry manuscripts: Junius, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book and Beowulf. A possible first extant English poem written by a woman is Wulf and Eadwacer; another such contender is The Wife's Lament. Other notable poems include The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Husband's Message, The Phoenix, Widsith and The Ruin. In addition to longer poems, the Exeter Book contains Advent Lyrics and Anglo-Saxon riddles and kennings. Kennings were metaphorical expressions such as "whale-path" for the sea. The material of the Eddas, now taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy.

985 — Eric the Red begins the Scandinavian colonization of Greenland. His son Leif Ericsson would discover North America and winter in Canada around the year 1000, almost 500 years before Columbus.

991 — The Battle of Maldon, a poem about a battle between the English and Danes which took place in 991. The Danes win and the English are forced to pay Danegeld. Losing is getting expensive!

1000 — The first known limerick ("The lion is wondrous strong") appears in France during the 11th century.

1035 — The death of King Cnut leads to the the loss of Danish influence when his son Harthacnut, reigning as Cnut III, is "forsaken [by the English] because he was too long in Denmark." Harold Harefoot becomes regent, then assumes the throne of England in 1037. When Harefoot dies in 1040, Cnut III reclaims the English throne, but dies in 1042.

1042 — King Edward the Confessor reigns as king of all England; he allegedly promises the throne of England to William of Normandy, his first cousin, but later reneges. He was the last king of the House of Wessex and the only English king to be canonized (made a saint). It was a dispute over the English crown after his death that lead to the Norman Conquest of England (see the entry for 1066).

1054 — The Great Schism of the Roman Catholic Church.

1066 — Edward the Confessor dies and Harold Godwinson inherits his throne. William the Conqueror defeats him at the Battle of Hastings, becoming King William I of England; this Norman Conquest of England marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English era. French and Latin now rule over lowly English! English words of French origin include: attorney, case, court, judge, justice, parliament, etc. They represent around 28% of English words. Thus the three major invasions of England provided around 87% of the evolving language's words. The remainder come from other languages or are of unknown origins. Anything said or written before the eleventh century would be difficult for us to understand with our "modern ears."

Our top ten poets of the Middle English Period: Wace, Layamon, Walter Map, Thomas of Britain, Guillaume de Lorris, John Gower, William Langland, the Archpoet, Francesco Petrarch, Dante Alighieri

Anglo-Norman or Middle English Period (1066-1332)
During the Anglo-Norman era the English people and their language were subjugated to their conquerors, who preferred Latin and French poetry and literature. But the conquerors were overcome linguistically by Geoffrey Chaucer, who by 1362 was writing poetry in a rough-but-still-usually-understandable version of early modern English. We will call this version of the language Middle English. But please keep in mind that during this period we only have glimpses of the native English language in poems and songs like How Long the Night ("Myrie it is while sumer ylast") and Sumer is icumen in.

1068 — The chansons de geste ("songs of heroic deeds"), performed by professional minstrels in castles and manors, celebrate the exploits of Charlemagne―the greatest of French kings―and his paladins. The earliest works in this genre appear to be the Chanson de Guillaume ("The Song of William"), Chanson de Roland ("The Song of Roland") and Gormont et Isembart. The Provencal Troubadours influenced Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Forms like the sestina, rondeau, triolet, canso, and ballata originated with the Provencal poets."

1086 — William I orders extensive surveys of his English holdings, recorded in the Domesday Book. William I notifies the Pope that England owes no allegiance to Rome, the first of many British rifts with the Vatican. Possible early date for The Song of Roland.

1096 — There is evidence of teaching at Oxford, which would become home to the first English university (see the entry at 1117).

1100 — Henry I reigns. Layamon writes Brut, a 32,000-line poem composed in Middle English that shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence and contains the first known reference to King Arthur in English.

1117 — The first English university, at Oxford, is founded. It has a "growth spurt" when King Henry II bans English students from attending the University of Paris (see the entry at 1167).

1133 — The birth of Henry II. He was highly literate: it was said that his hands always contained either a bow or a book. However, he remained a Norman with large landholdings in France, and it is doubtful that he spoke English.

1150 — The first extant text written in Middle English may be a sermon given by Ralph d’Escures, Archbishop of Canterbury.

1154 — Henry II reigns, the first Plantagenet king. The Plantagenets were Normans with large land holdings in France. Henry II spent more time in Europe than in England during his reign.

1170 — Henry II has Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, assassinated.

1189 — Richard I, aka Richard Cœur de Lion ("Richard the Lionheart") joins the Third Crusade while his brother John acts as regent. Like his father, Richard I will be more absent than present in England.

1200 — How Long the Night ("Myrie it is while sumer ylast") is one of the great early rhyming poems of the Middle English period; it remains largely understandable to modern English readers. The oldest known English ballad is Judas, probably composed sometime in the 13th century. The terms "ballad" and "ballet" have the same root: dance or "the cadence of consenting feet." Ballads were originally written to accompany dances: think of two-stepping to a reel at a hoe-down. At this point English poetry is becoming more song-like, with meter and rhyme. Its primary purpose is entertainment: song and dance. Many of the poets―if not most―are minstrels, perhaps traveling and performing for money or for shelter, food and drink.

1215 — The Magna Carta forces King John to grant liberties and rights to Englishmen in return for taxation (but the document was still drafted in French).

1260 — Sumer is icumen in is a medieval English round, or rota. It came with a musical score and instructions for the singing of rounds, in Latin! It is one of the oldest songs that can still be sung today. Other early rhyming poems that may predate the first major English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, include Fowles in the Frith, Ich am of Irlaunde ("I am of Ireland"), Now Goeth Sun Under Wood, Pity Mary, Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt? ("Where are now those who lived before us?") and Alison. While Germanic, French and Latin influences remain, the robust English language is coming into its own, and is about to claim primacy. Meanwhile, a new form of poetry is being written in northern Italy: the dolce stil nuovo ("sweet new style").

1265 — The birth of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), generally considered to be one of the world's greatest poets, comparable to Homer and Shakespeare. Simon de Montfort summons the first directly-elected English Parliament.

1304 — The birth of Francesco Petrarch, one of the earliest humanists and the creator of the sonnet ("little song"). Petrarch would be a major influence on early modern English poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. They, in turn, would influence other poets, including William Shakespeare.

1317 — Dante's Inferno.

*1320 — The Birth of John Wyclif or Wycliffe. He would be an important translator of the Bible into English. Wycliffe has been called "England's first European mind." His translations of the Psalms may be the first example of English free verse.

1325 — Cursor Mundi, a verse history of the world; the Luttrell Psalter; approximate births of the English poets John Gower and William Langland. Gower was one of the first poets to create an "English style." The great Persian poet Hafez/Hafiz is born around this time in Shiraz, Iran.

1332 — English replaces French in the British Parliament and courts, heralding the end of the Anglo-Norman era. From this point forward the most important English poets―Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Skelton, Dunbar, et al―will write in some form of native English, or in multiple languages. For instance, Gower wrote in English, French and Latin.

Our top ten poets of the Late Medieval Period: Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Langland, the Gawain/Pearl poet, Charles D'Orleans, John Skelton, John Gower, William Dunbar, Geoffrey Chaucer

Late Medieval or Chaucerian Period (1340-1486)
Chaucer made the English vernacular popular in much the same way that Dante and Martin Luther made the Italian and German vernaculars popular. But English poetry was to shape-shift yet again with the appearance of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, both born in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

*1340 — The birth of Geoffrey Chaucer (approximate). Chaucer becomes the first major poet to write in vernacular English. Thus Chaucer is to English as Dante was to Italian. Long before Shakespeare, Chaucer would create unforgettable characters like the Wife of Bath, the Miller and the Pardoner. These are the first "developed" literary characters in English literature. Chaucer would also be the first English poet to mention free (or freer) verse.

1341 — Petrarch is crowned Poet Laureate in Rome.

1350 — Boccaccio's Decameron. Around this time there is an "Alliterative Revival" in England, with the Gawain/Pearl poet and others employing the methods of the Anglo-Saxon scops, perhaps in a deliberate "turning away" from the French/Latin verses favored by Norman kings and lords.

1362 — Chaucer is writing poems in English; Parliament is opened with a speech in English for the first time; English also replaces French in courts of law.

1367 — William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman is an alliterative, allegorical dream poem quite unlike any other English poem to date/ For a time, Langland―known as "Long Will" because of his height―lives within a few hundred yards of Chaucer, in London. Langland has been called England's first reformer poet. Chaucer becomes a member of the royal court, as a valet to King Edward III.

1380 — Works of the so-called Gawain poet, including Pearl, Patience, Cleanness and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

1381 — Watt Tyler and John Ball lead the Peasants' Revolt in response to the poll tax and march on London.

1382 — Richard III promises to repeal the poll taxes, but returning rebels are executed; John Wycliffe translates the Bible into English, introducing over 1,000 new words into the language.

1385 — Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem ancient Troy; it has been called "the first modern novel" although it was written in rhyming verse.

1387 — Chaucer begins work on his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, the first major work of English literature.

1400 — The death of Chaucer leaves his Canterbury Tales unfinished. Chaucer is the first poet to be buried in the "Poet's Corner" of Westminster Abbey.

1429 — Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl, begins her campaign to drive the English from France, with considerable success.

1430 — A "haunting riddle-chant" from this era is I Have a Yong Suster, an anonymous Medieval English riddle-poem that has also been described as a popular song and folk song. A similar haunting poem is the Corpus Christi Carol, which was discovered in a manuscript dated to around 1504, but which could have been composed earlier.

1431 — Joan of Arc is burned at the stake as a witch; Henry VI is crowned King of France in Paris.

1455 — The Guttenberg Bible is the first book printed with moveable type.

1473 — William Caxton prints the first typeset English book, his translation of the History of Troy.

1476 — William Caxton prints Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Prior to the publication of Caxton's books, reading and writing had been largely confined to monastic centers and elites who could afford expensive hand-produced manuscripts. Thanks to Caxton, reading and writing were about to spread, resulting in an explosion of knowledge.

1485 — Henry Tudor lands in Wales, where he defeats and kills Richard III in the last major battle of the Wars of the Roses; Henry Tudor becomes King Henry VII. Thus begins the Tudor Period, which marks the end of the Middle Ages in England.

Our top ten Tudor/Elizabethan poets: George Chapman, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Henry Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare

Early Modern English: the English Renaissance and the Tudor and Elizabethan Periods (1486-1618)
The Tudor era saw the introduction of the sonnet and blank verse, both of which were based on iambic pentameter. The poetry of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard may mark the beginning of modern English poetry. This era ended with the deaths of Queen Elizabeth, its most important English monarch, and William Shakespeare, its most important English writer, in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

1491 — The birth of Henry Tudor (Henry VIII). The poet John Skelton would tutor the young Duke of York. The death of William Caxton. His work would be carried on by his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde.

1492 — Columbus discovers the Americas. John Skelton is made Laureate by the University of Louvain. William Dunbar accompanies an embassy to Denmark and France, but his duties are unknown.

1503 — The birth of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), a courtier/soldier/gentleman and perhaps the first modern English poet. The birth of the English poet John Leland/Layland (1503-1552); Leland would write a book of elegies to Wyatt. William Dunbar's The Thrissill and the Rois and Sweet Rose of Virtue. By this time Dunbar is attached to the court of King James IV of Scotland. Richard Arnold's Chronicle includes the ballad "The Nut Brown Maid."

1504 — Leonardo Da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo finishes his masterpiece David. The earliest known version of the Corpus Christi Carol was discovered in a manuscript dated to around 1504.

1508 — Michelangelo begins to paint the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. William Dunbar's The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis, The Goldyn Targe, Lament for the Makaris and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen. Several of Dunbar's poems were included in the first books to be printed in Scotland, now known as the the Chepman and Myllar Prints. Poems by John Lydgate and Robert Henryson were also included.

1509 — Henry Tudor marries Catherine of Aragon and reigns as King Henry VIII.

1516 — Sir Thomas More's Utopia is published by Erasmus. The birth of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey; he was a poet and the first cousin of Anne Boleyn. John Skelton writes Magnificence.

1517 — Martin Luther publishes his 95 theses against the Roman Catholic Church, kick-starting the Protestant Reformation, which would have tremendous implications for England ...

*1525 — William Tyndale is working on his English translation of the New Testament, possibly in Wittenberg (where Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation).

1527 — Henry VIII seeks the Pope's permission to divorce Catherine of Aragon but is refused, leading to Henry's subsequent "divorce" from the Roman Catholic Church.

1529 — Henry VIII declares himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England. The "Reformation Parliament" is so-called because it passed legislation that led to the English Reformation. Death of John Skelton.

1534 — Around this time, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard introduce the English sonnet, modeled after the Petrarchan sonnet, with 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

*1535 — The first complete English translation of the Bible is created by Miles Coverdale.

1536 — Anne Boleyn is beheaded; Henry VIII marries his third wife, Jane Seymour; Thomas Wyatt, imprisoned in the Tower of London for his alleged affair with Anne Boleyn, may have written his famous poems Whoso List to Hunt and They Flee from Me around this time; William Tyndale is convicted of heresy, strangled to death, then burned at the stake in Antwerp.

1552 — The births of Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser; the latter was perhaps the first great English Romantic poet and the precursor of Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, et al.

1557 — Henry Howard's translation of the Aeneid is published. Tottel's Miscellany, perhaps the first modern English poetry anthology, includes poems by Henry Howard and Sir Thomas Wyatt.

1558 — Mary I dies childless; Queen Elizabeth I reigns; thus begins the Elizabethan Period. Protestant reforms are reinstituted, but Elizabeth is not as bloody as her sister Mary.

1559 — Birth of the English poet George Chapman, who would author more than twenty plays and translate Homer. Chapman has been suggested as the "rival poet" mentioned by Shakespeare in his work.

1564 — The births of the English poets and playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare; the latter is generally considered to be the greatest English poet and playwright. The birth of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who would run afoul of the Roman Catholic inquisition for claiming that the earth revolves around the sun.

1565 — Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet and explorer, brings potatoes and tobacco back from the New World.

1579 — Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender has been called "the first work of the English literary Renaissance."

1582 — William Shakespeare, eighteen, marries Anne Hathaway, who is eight years older. She is three months pregnant. Philip Sidney is knighted. Around this time Queen Elizabeth I writes the poem "On Monsieur's Departure."

1584 — Walter Ralegh founds the first American colony, names it Virginia after Elizabeth (the Virgin Queen), and is made a knight. Christopher Marlowe completes his play Tamburlaine. With a BA and MA from Cambridge, Marlowe is the first of the "university wits" to employ blank verse.

1587 — Mary, Queen of Scots, is executed at Fotheringhay Castle on charges of treason. Sir Walter Ralegh, still in favor, is appointed captain of the guard. The birth of the English poet Mary Wroth. Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine is first performed. According to the critic Harold Bloom, thus begins the "richest eighty years of poetry in English" with Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, Marvell, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton all writing and/or being published within that period. (We, however, would suggest 1880-1960 with Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, Tennyson, both Brownings, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats, Dowson, both Cranes, Frost, Sandburg, Stevens,  Lawrence, Pound, Wylie, Jeffers, Eliot, Aiken, MacLeish, Millay, Owen, cummings, Bogan, Hughes, Auden, Bishop, Lowell, Larkin, Plath, et al!)

1589 — William Shakespeare's first play may have been The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Walter Ralegh visits Edmund Spenser's castle, takes an interest in his poetry, and helps him publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene the following year in London, where Spenser meets Queen Elizabeth with Ralegh's help.

1592 — Shakespeare is making a name for himself, as he is called an "upstart crow" by Robert Greene.

1593 — Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Christopher Marlowe is murdered, perhaps assassinated, at age 29.

1594 — Richard Burbage assembles a group of actors called the Lord Chamberlain's Men: members of the troupe include his leading-man son Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare.

1598 — Shakespeare acts in Ben Jonson's play Sejanus. Led by the Burbages, the Lord Chamberlain's Men dismantle The Theatre and use its beams to begin work on The Globe. Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets" are mentioned for the first time, by Francis Meres.

1599 — The Globe Theater opens for business in London; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is one of the first plays staged there. The Globe had the best theater, the best actors, the best plays and the best playwright.

1601 — The first performance of Shakespeare's play Hamlet.

1604 — Shakespeare is granted a coat of arms; Othello is first performed and includes one of the earliest English limericks; James I becomes a patron of Shakespeare's acting company.

1605 — Shakespeare's plays King Lear and Macbeth.

1609 — Shakespeare publishes his Sonnets.
e of his last major plays. Thomas Campion's A New Way of Making Four Parts in Counterpoint.

*1611 — The King James Bible is published in still-readable English; it contains some of the oldest and best free verse in the English language, such as the Song of Solomon. Emilia Lanyer's words attributed to Eve have been called "the first clear glimmer of English feminism in verse."

1612 — Anne Bradstreet, perhaps the first notable American poet, is born in Northampton, England into a Puritan family with a well-stocked library. John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi.

1613 — The Globe Theatre burns during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, which may have been his last-authored play, co-written with John Fletcher.

1616 — The death of William Shakespeare. George Chapman's translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are published. Galileo Galilei is forced to stop saying that the sun is the center of the solar system, by the Roman Catholic inquisition.

Our top ten poets of the Cavalier Period: George Herbert, James Shirley, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Milton

Poets at War with Each Other: The Cavaliers, the Reformation and the Restoration (1617-1675)
The Cavalier Period is marked by poets who praised the virtues of war, honor, chivalry, duty, monarchs, God, church and faith. The Cavalier poets are sometimes called the "tribe of Ben" or the "sons of Ben" because of their admiration for Ben Jonson. Cavaliers like Richard Lovelace and Reformers like Milton were often at war with each other―not only with their pens, but by casting their lots with opposing armies. Milton stands out as the first great Romantic anti-establishment poet: a powerful voice of dissent against the status quo. While he claimed to "justify the ways of God to man," as William Blake pointed out later, Milton actually spoke for the rebellious angels, and made Romantic heroes of Satan, Adam and Eve. Many of the great poets to come would also be dissenters: William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, et al.

1620 — The Pilgrims set sail for America in the Mayflower; they land at Cape Cod and found the New Plymouth colony. Thomas Campion dies, possibly of the plague. Robert Herrick earns an MA from Cambridge. Harold Bloom has called Tom O'Bedlam's Song "the most magnificent Anonymous poem in the language." It was probably written early in the 17th century. Bloom describes the poem as being "all but High Romantic vision," which would put it around two hundred years ahead of its time!

1639 — Charles I raises an army of 20,000 troops and invades Scotland in an attempt to impose his will on the Scottish people. John Milton returns from the continent when the Bishops' Wars in Scotland presage civil war in England. He begins to write prose tracts praise of "the divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif" and in service of the pro-reformation Puritans and Parliamentarians. At the same time, Richard Lovelace is fighting on the opposite side for the king, first as a senior ensign, later as a captain, in Lord Goring's regiment. Sir John Suckling and Thomas Carew also side with King Charles I in Scotland.

1649 — Charles I is found guilty of high treason by the Rump Parliament, is sentenced to death, then executed by beheading. John Milton writes a tract which defends the right of the people to hold their rulers accountable. He then publishes an explicit defense of the regicide, becoming a composer of "official propaganda." Cromwell leads his army to Ireland.

1652 — John Milton publishes a defense of the English people in Latin. He also publishes a sonnet dedicated to Oliver Cromwell ("Cromwell, our chief of men ..."). It was Milton's only Shakespearean sonnet.

1653 — Oliver Cromwell is made England's Lord Protector and Regent.

1658 — Oliver Cromwell's death throws England back into chaos. As the republic begins to disintegrate, Milton continues to write treatises in favor of a non-monarchial government. Milton begins work on his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, perhaps using aspects of the English Civil War and its primary figures for material. "Paradise Lost positively bristles with learning." John Dryden writes an elegy for Cromwell.

1660 — King Charles II is handed the British crown and throne in the Restoration. John Milton goes into hiding for his life, then is briefly jailed after copies of his books are burned by the Hangman of London (the public executioner). He is fined and pardoned in December; Andrew Marvell helps secure his release. Marvell protests in Parliament that Milton's jail fees (£150) are excessive. Marvell would campaign for religious toleration. 

1664 — John Milton completes Paradise Lost.

Our top ten poets of the Augustan Period: Edward Taylor, Christopher Smart, Aphra Behn, William Collins, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Waller, Thomas Gray

The Augustan or Metaphysical Period (1675-1749)
The Augustan poets may have over-valued wit and extravagant, sometimes strained metaphysical "conceits." As a result, the poems of the era's major poets, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, may strike modern readers as being fanciful, boring and overly didactic. As A. E. Housman later observed, that this was a "dry period" in English poetry.

1681 — Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, his best-known poem, is published in a collection of his work, three years after his death. However, his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return was removed from all but one copy and would not be reprinted until 1776. John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel: a Poem is published.

1682 — John Dryden's satirical poem Mac Flecknoe is published.

1688 — The birth of the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1784). Pope, described as a "delicate precocious boy," suffered from Pott's disease, which stunted his growth and left him with a severe hunchback and nearly an invalid.

1694 — The birth of the highly influential French writer and philosopher Voltaire.

1704 — Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub satirizes the abuses of Christianity.

1716 — The birth of the English poet and early Romantic, Thomas Gray (1716-1771). Gray is generally regarded as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century.  

1717 — Voltaire is sent to the Bastille for writing scandalous poems (not the first time he will land in hot water for speaking his mind). While in prison or soon thereafter he adopts the name "Voltaire." He never explains what the name means. One theory is "volunteer." According to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as le petit volontaire ("determined little thing") as a child, and he resurrected a variant of the nickname. The name also has connotations of energy, speed and daring. But it was just one of 178 pen names that he employed during his long, eventful and storied career. Voltaire mainly argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority, and he supported a constitutional monarchy that would protect the people's rights. Unfortunately, these views would not prove popular with church and state!

1747 — Samuel Johnson's poem Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick. Thomas Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Christopher Smart, a spendthrift, is arrested for debts to his tailor.

Our top ten poets of the Romantic Era: Thomas Chatterton, Walter Scott, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, William Blake

The Romantic Era (1750-1824)
The Romantic Movement brought a sea change in to the world of art, poetry, literature and other creative endeavors. The writers and artists of the Romantic Movement created work that celebrates nature, individuality and (one might suggest) heresy. Emotion, imagination, and independent thinking are three elements commonly found in Romantic poetry. The Romantics broke away from both the "cultural authority of classical Rome" and the "dominance of the Renaissance tradition."

1750 — The French Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau becomes famous for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Rousseau is a deist, a free thinker and a heretic.

*1751 — Denis Diderot's Encyclopaedia is published between 1751 and 1772 (in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of engravings). Diderot began work on the Encyclopaedia in 1746. It occupied more than twenty years of his life. Many of the contributors were radical thinkers who embodied the ideals of reason and enlightenment that led to the revolution in France. The Encyclopaedia was compiled and written under constant threat of censorship and surveillance. During his editorship Diderot was arrested and imprisoned for three months. Its motivating principles were freedom of thought and criticism of authority, and it was written in a language intended for everyone's understanding. Engels wrote of him, "If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the enthusiasm for truth and justice...it was Diderot." Important contributors included Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Louis de Jaucourt. Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is published and becomes a "literary sensation." Christopher Smart publishes as "Mrs. Mary Midnight" in the literary magazine The Midwife.

1752 — Birth of the English poet Thomas Chatterton, called the "marvellous boy" by William Wordsworth in his poem "Resolution and Independence." Wordsworth named Chatterton one of his primary influences even though Chatterton died at age seventeen. John Keats called Chatterton the "purest writer in the English language." Samuel Taylor Coleridge worked on his "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" for over thirty years. Chatterton has been called the first Romantic poet, although Thomas Gray is also a candidate, as are other poets including William Blake and Charlotte Turner Smith.

1753 — Phillis Wheatley, the first notable African-American poet, is born somewhere in Africa, perhaps in Senegal.

1754 — Voltaire is banned from France by Louis XV, and he is unwelcome in Germany, so he takes up residence in Geneva, Switzerland. However, he has a falling-out with Calvinists over his plays, and he buys a large estate in Ferney in 1758, where he will spend most of the remaining 20 years of his life (still stirring up trouble for the state- and religious-minded).

1755 — Rousseau has a significant article on political economy published in Diderot's landmark Encyclopédie. Samuel Johnson publishes A Dictionary of the English Language.

*1757 — The birth of the English romantic poet William Blake, the son of a haberdasher. Blake was perhaps the greatest of the English Romantic poets and one of England's greatest visual artists and engravers to boot. He was one of the first writers to fiercely criticize the dehumanizing influence of the industrial revolution on human cities and societies. Blake was also a mystic who claimed to see angels and saints on a daily basis. He was also one of the first major poets to write free (or freer) verse.

1758 — Voltaire completes his most famous work and wickedest satire, Candide, or Optimism. Published in 1759, it lampoons the ideas that "this is the best of all possible worlds," that "things work out for the best" and that "God is in control." Voltaire treated the orthodox Christian faith like a very leaky pail, as would notable Romantic and Modernist poets to come.

1759 — The birth of the Scottish romantic poet Robert Burns, generally considered to be the greatest Scottish poet of all time and notable for his "lucid pathos." 

*1760 — Christopher Smart writes Jubilate Agno around this time while confined to a mental asylum; it is an early free verse poem about his cat Jeoffry.

1773 — Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral is the first book of poetry by an Afro-American slave; her poetry was praised by George Washington and John Hancock.

1776 — The American colonies defiantly declare independence with words written in ringing iambic pentameter by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin: "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."

1778 — Rousseau dies. Voltaire returns from exile to receive honor in Paris, in the form of the adoration of the masses, then also dies.

1789 — Start of the French Revolution. The upheavals in France greatly influenced the artists and writers of the Romantic Movement. William Blake's Songs of Innocence is published; the poems include "The Lamb," "Holy Thursday" and "The Little Black Boy." Blake illustrates and engraves every page himself. Blake was unique among Christian poets in that he located innocence in the individual's childhood, rather than in the human race's childhood (i.e., Adam and Eve). Blake also publishes The Book of Thel.

1794 — William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), one of the first notable "home-grown" American poets, is born. William Blake's Songs of Experience is published; the poems include "The Sick Rose," "London" and "The Tyger." According to the Chicago Tribune, Blake's "The Tyger" is the most anthologized poem in the English language. Blake also publishes Europe: A Prophecy which may be literally visionary. The most famous of these images, that of an ancient man kneeling down from a red orb, measuring the abyss below him with a compass and called the “Ancient of Days,” was inspired by a vision that allegedly hovered before Blake at the top of his staircase in Lambeth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge meets Robert Southey. Coleridge would marry Southey's sister-in-law. Coleridge begins taking opium for a toothache.

1798 — Lyrical Ballads, written primarily by William Wordsworth with a few poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is published. This book becomes the foundational text of the English Romantic Movement. The longest poem included is Coleridge's dark, gothic poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." It would inspire many poems in a similar vein.

*1803 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, an influential American poet and philosopher, is born. He would be a mentor of Henry David Thoreau and the first great free verse poet, Walt Whitman.

*1809 — Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), an American writer, editor, literary critic and romantic poet, is born. Poe would be a major influence on later French romantic and modernist poets, such as Charles Baudelaire.

*1819 — The birth of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), an American romantic poet and the first great free verse poet of the English language.

Our top ten poets of the Victorian Era: Anne Reeve Aldrich, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman

The Victorian Era and Pre-Modernism (1837-1901)
This is an interesting period because poets like Tennyson and Longfellow were writing in a more traditional style, while poets like Whitman and Dickinson were beginning to "make it new" (to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound). Whitman, Dickinson and Mark Twain would help free American poetry and literature from what had been largely mimicry of European voices.

1837 — Queen Victoria takes the throne of the United Kingdom, leading to what has become known as tame and staid Victorianism. /bookmark/

1843 — The Christy Minstrels form; they perform in blackface and are very popular. The group pays Stephen C. Foster $15,000 for exclusive rights to his song "Old Folks at Home." The birth of the American novelist Henry James (1843-1916). When his friend Robert Southey dies, William Wordsworth becomes England's Poet Laureate.

1844 — The birth of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Hopkins is notable for his eclectic style and use of "sprung rhythm." Hopkins would become known to the world only after his poems were published posthumously in 1918 by his friend and British poet laureate Robert Bridges. The birth of Robert Bridges (1844-1930). Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett begin to correspond. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes The Waif.

1845 — Edgar Allan Poe writes and publishes his most famous poem, The Raven. It becomes a "popular sensation" and makes Poe a household name. Henry David Thoreau moves into a small house on the banks of Walden Pond, with the goal of "simple living." Robert Browning begins to court Elizabeth Barrett. Dante Gabriel Rossetti enters the Antique School of the Royal Accademy.

1846 — Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning secretly marry at St. Marylebone Church in London: they would become poetry's first "super couple." Walt Whitman writes a review of the early novels of a young writer named Herman Melville. Melville publishes Typhee, a romanticized account of his life among "cannibal" Polynesians; it becomes an "overnight bestseller." Adolphe Sax invents the saxophone. Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte and Anne Bronte publish a joint collection of poems under the pseudonyms "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell." It sells a whopping two copies the first year. They would do better as novelists.

1847 — Tennyson publishes The Princess: A Medley containing poems such as "Tears, Idle Tears." Longfellow publishes Evangeline. Emily Bronte publishers her dark gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte Bronte publishes Jane Eyre under the pseudonym "Currer Bell." Edgar Allan Poe's wife Virginia dies and he becomes increasingly unstable. Herman Melville publishes Omoo, once again romanticizing adventure and cannibalism. The novel becomes his second bestseller.

1848 — Walt Whitman loses his editing job because he opposes slavery. He returns to New York, where he founds an antislavery newspaper, the Weekly Freeman. The paper's offices are burned after the first issue is published. For the next six years, Whitman works as a freelance journalist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti leaves the Royal Accademy to study under Ford Madox Brown. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais; aligned poets and artists would include William Michael Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edward Bourne-Jones and Ford Maddox Brown. The German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. Edgar Allan Poe's poem Eureka posits a singularity (a "primordial particle") that produces the Big Bang (a theory that didn't achieve mainstream acceptance until more than a century later, in the 1960s). Poe also predicts an expanding universe and black holes. Poe publishes his poem "Ulalume," which has been called a masterpiece. Henry David Thoreau delivers a lecture on civil disobedience, a concept that would appeal to Leo tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Emily Bronte dies prematurely at age 30, shortly after the death of her brother Branwell.

1849 — Edgar Allan Poe is found "delirious" on the streets of Baltimore; he dies shortly thereafter. Poe was a pioneer of the "art for art's sake" movement, the symbolist movement, science fiction, the detective story, and the psychological thriller. But he has his detractors; Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the jingle man." Anne Bronte dies prematurely at age 29.

1850 — The birth of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). William Wordsworth dies. His widow publishes The Prelude (his "poem to Coleridge") posthumously. Tennyson publishes his masterpiece In Memoriam A.H.H. and is made Poet Laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. T. S. Eliot opined that in Maud and In Memoriam, Tennyson displayed "the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown." Dante Gabriel Rossetti publishes his best-known poem, "The Blessed Damozel" in the Germ. Charles Dickens attacks the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood over the painting Christ in the House of His Parents by John Everett Millais; Dickens considers Mary to be ugly and thus the painting blasphemous! Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she dedicates to her husband Robert Browning.

1851 — Stephen Foster writes "Old Folks at Home" for a minstrel show; it is published in sheet music. Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick, which he dedicates to Nathaniel Hawthorne. But the novel is a flop in its day.

1852 — Alfred Tennyson's son is born and is named Hallam after his friend and fellow poet. Charles Dickens publishes Bleak House.

1854 — Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is the most famous occasional poem by a Poet Laureate. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow receives so much fan mail he says "all my unanswered letters hang upon me like an evil conscience." Charles Dickens publishes Hard Times, his "baldest and sharpest" work. The birth of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), an Anglo-Irish poet, playwright, novelist, wit and "quintessential aesthete." Henry David Thoreau publishes his best-known work, Walden. Robert Frost later wrote: "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."

1855 — Walt Whitman self-publishes his revolutionary book of free verse poems, Leaves of Grass. Ralph Waldo Emerson sends Whitman a letter praising the book and congratulating him on "the beginning of a great career." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes Song of Hiawatha. Charlotte Bronte dies at age 39, the last of the three Bronte sisters.

1856 — Walt Whitman publishes the second edition of Leaves of Grass, with 32 new poems. He also reprints Emerson's congratulatory letter without permission, angering the elder poet. The birth of the Anglo-Irish writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Dante Gabriel Rossetti begins painting femme fatales, using models such as Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris (the wife of his friend William Morris).

1857 — Herman Melville publishes the longest poem in American literature, Clarel. The verse novel Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's was called "the greatest poem in the English language" by John Ruskin (an idea that did not seem to catch on with the public or with other critics). The birth of the novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The Atlantic Monthly, known today as The Atlantic, is founded by  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell. "They did not set out to exclude women from the gathering," but Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served! The Atlantic would go on to publish some of America's best-known literary and political names, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Helen Keller, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and JFK.

1859 — The popular song "Dixie" was ironically written by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a Northerner from Ohio. Charles Dickens publishes A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, intensifying what has been called the "Victorian crisis of faith." George Eliot's novel Adam Bede. Alfred Tennyson publishes Idylls of the King. The birth of the English poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936).

1860 — Charles Dickens publishes Great Expectations. George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss. Gerard Manley Hopkins has his first published poem, "The Escorial."

1861 — The Confederates attack Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe writes the poem "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the music of "John Brown's Body." Walt Whitman moves to Washington D.C. and works as a nurse in military hospitals. Jules Verne works on his first science fiction novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.

1862 — Emily Dickinson's "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" is published; hers is one of the first and most unique voices of modernism. Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market and Other Poems is published. George Meredith's sonnet sequence Modern Love is published. Henry David Thoreau dies.

1863 — Samuel Langhorne Clemens uses the penname "Mark Twain" for the first time. Although better known as a novelist and humorist, Twain would write more than 120 poems during his storied career. Twain was called the "father of American literature" by William Faulkner. Gerard Manley Hopkins studies the classics at Oxford, where he meets the poet Robert Bridges; they would become lifelong friends.

1864 — Walter Savage Landor dies in Florence. John Clare dies at the asylum where he spent his last 23 years. Jules Verne writes the early science fiction novel Journey to the Center of the Earth.

1865 — The Civil War ends when the Confederate states surrender. Slavery is abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. Walt Whitman publishes his elegy for Lincoln, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd." Whitman's boss at the Department of the Interior fires him because of the supposedly obscene content of Leaves of Grass. Algernon Charles Swinburne achieves his first literary success with Atalanta in Calydon. Gerard Manley Hopkins meets Digby Mackworth Dolben, a "Christian Uranian," at Oxford, and there seems to have been a strong erotic connection on Hopkins' part. Jules Verne writes the first outer space adventure novel, From the Earth to the Moon. The birth of the English journalist, poet, short-story writer and novelist Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes his translation of Dante, The Divine Comedy, just in time for Dante's 600th birthday! One of the first ten copies is rushed to Italy!

1866 — The birth of the American poet and novelist Anne Reeve Aldrich. Her books include The Rose of Flame (1889), The Feet of Love (1890), Nadine and Other Poems (1893), A Village Ophelia and Other Stories (1899) and Songs about Life, Love, and Death (1892). She has been called an American Sappho. Whitman and his friend William D. O'Connor publish The Good Gray Poet, a defense of Whitman in the wake of his being fired from his government post. Fisk University, a black college, is founded in Nashville, Tennessee. Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads brought him instant notoriety because of his "indecent" themes. Walter Pater tutors Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins writes his most ascetic poem, "The Habit of Perfection," then gives up writing poetry for Lent! John Henry Newman receives Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. The birth of H. G. Wells (1866-1946), an English writer called the father of the science fiction novel, along with Jules Verne. Herman Melville, strongly opposed to slavery, publishes a book of poems, Battle Pieces.

1867 — Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach has been called a masterpiece of Early Modernism, employing irregular rhyme and form, skepticism, pessimism, and exhibiting a crisis of faith in both God and mankind. The birth of Scott Joplin, the African-American pianist and composer known as the "King of Ragtime." Slave Songs of the United States, the earliest collection of African-American spirituals, is published. Digby Mackworth Dolben drowns. His death inspires a number of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The birth of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), who sometimes wrote "potboiling fiction" and became "unusually wealthy for a writer."

1868 — Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book has been called the climax of his poetic career. Gerard Manley Hopkins elects to become a Jesuit, makes a "bonfire" of his poems and gives up poetry for seven years.

1869 — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow receives an honorary degree from Cambridge and visits with Queen Victoria. The birth of the American poet Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), who would win three Pulitzer Prizes and be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. The birth of the English poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928). Her poetry would be admired by Thomas Hardy, who called her the best female poet of her day, and by Virginia Woolf, who called her "quite unlike anyone else." Mew never married, cut her hair short, and often dressed like a male dandy. Matthew Arnold's collection of essays Culture and Anarchy.

1870 — Charles Dickens dies with his Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, and is buried at the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. The birth of J. M. Synge (1871-1909), the author of the play The Playboy of the Western World. Jules Verne writes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a science fiction novel about a submarine and its pilot, Captain Nemo. The birth of Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), an Anglo-French writer, poet and historian.

1871 — Lewis Carroll's surrealistic Through the Looking Glass. George Eliot's Middlemarch. Stephen Crane, an American poet, is born. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are formed.

1873 — Walter Pater publishes Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Oscar Wilde said the book "has had such a strange influence over my life," while Arthur Symons called it "the most beautiful book of prose in our literature." Robert Bridges publishes his first collection of poems. Jules Verne writes Around the World in Eighty Days.

1874 — Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein, American poets, are born, as is G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), an English journalist, novelist, poet, critic and Christian apologist. Jules Verne writes The Mysterious Island, which brings back the mysterious Captain Nemo.

1875 — Gerard Manley Hopkins resumes writing poetry with his long poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

1876 — George Eliot publishes Daniel Deronda.

1877 — Gerard Manley Hopkins writes a collection of sonnets, God's Grandeur. The title poem would become one of his most famous.

1878 — Carl Sandburg, an American poet, is born. Henry James's novel The Europeans.

1879 — Wallace Stevens, an American poet, is born. E. M. Forster, an English novelist, is born.

1880 — Ten years after the death of Charles Dickens, George Eliot dies. Thus the High Victorian era lapses into the Late Victorian.

1881 — Oscar Wilde's poems are published; he and Whitman were among the first gay poets to "come out of the closet" publicly. Tony Pastor, a former circus ringleader, creates what we now call vaudeville by creating family-friendly acts for his New York theaters. However, vaudeville acts would often be less "polite" than what Pastor had envisioned. Henry James's novel A Portrait of a Lady.

1882 — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dies, comparable to Tennyson in fame, popularity, influence and book sales. Longfellow was the first American poet to have a bust at Poet's Corner. Francis James Child publishes a book of 305 popular ballads as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The ballads included are often called the "Child ballads." Some probably date back to the 13th century. The birth of the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and the English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). The death of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

1883 — Alfred Tennyson accepts a peerage, becoming Lord Alfred Tennyson, as he is known today (or Alfred, Lord Tennyson). He was the first British subject to be made a lord for his writing. William Carlos Williams, an American poet, is born. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island.

1884 — Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn takes a strong stand against racism and slavery. Huck says he would rather go to hell then turn in his friend Jim, the escaped slave.

1885 — Ezra Pound, an American poet and critic, is born.

1886 — H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), an American poet, is born. Robert Louis Stevenson's novels Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Joseph Conrad applies for British nationality and is accepted.

1888 — T. S. Eliot, an American poet, is born. Columbia Records, the first major American record label, is founded.

1889 — William Butler Yeats publishes The Wanderings of Oisin. He would become a leading poet of modernism. Yeats meets and falls in love with the lovely Irish nationalist and revolutionary Maude Gonne. Robert Browning dies and is buried next to Alfred Tennyson at the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Gerard Manley Hopkins dies, unknown as a poet, of typhoid fever. George Bernard Shaw's Fabian Essays. Rudyard Kipling meets Mark Twain.

1890 — Emily Dickinson's poems are published posthumously. Fin-de-siècle (1890-1900) poets who took notes from the French symbolists include William Butler Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde and Charles Algernon Swinburne. Yeats co-founds the Rhymer's Club and is admitted into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

1891 — William Butler Yeats proposes to Maude Gonne, but is rejected. Oscar Wilde's novella A Picture of Dorian Gray. William Morris writes the "utopian romance" novel News from Nowhere. Herman Melville dies with Billy Budd completed but unpublished. The novel would be discovered in a breadbox in 1919 and published in 1924.

1892 — Whitman prepares the final edition of Leaves of Grass, known as the "Deathbed Edition." Whitman dies at age 72, one of the greatest and most influential poets of all time. Lord Alfred Tennyson also dies at age 83, the greatest of the Victorian poets and the longest-tenured English Poet Laureate, at 42 years. "Harlem Rag" by the pianist Tommy Turpin is the first known ragtime composition. The birth of the American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1850).

1893 — The birth of the great English war (or anti-war) poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). William Butler Yeats publishes The Celtic Twilight.

1894 — E. E. Cummings, an American poet, is born. William Butler Yeats has an affair with Olivia Shakespear. Rudyard Kipling writes The Jungle Book.

1895 — "America the Beautiful" is a poem written by Katharine Lee Bates that is later set to music by Samuel A. Ward. Scott Joplin publishes two ragtime compositions. Cornetist Buddy Bolden forms a band; he has been credited with the countermelody of jazz. Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. H. G. Wells writes the early science fiction novel The Time Machine.

1896 — A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad is published. Gay and an atheist, Housman was one of the strongest voices of early modernism. The introduction of radio technology. William Butler Yeats attends his first séance and is introduced to Lady Gregory, who becomes his patron. Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure, is considered "shocking" and he turns to poetry for the last 30 years of his life. H. G. Wells writes The Island of Dr. Moreau.

1897 — John Philip Sousa composes "Stars and Stripes Forever" and more than 100 popular marches; composers Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb establish and popularize ragtime, giving birth to America's popular music industry. Jimmie Rogers, known as the "father of country music," is born. H. G. Wells writes the early science fiction novel The Invisible Man.

1898 — Thomas Hardy's Wessex Poems. Oscar Wilde's long poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. H. G. Wells writes The War of the Worlds.

1899 — Ernest Dowson's Decorations: in Verse and Prose. Dowson would be a major influence on T. S. Eliot, and thus on modernism. Hart Crane, an American poet, is born. Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" is published and becomes the first ragtime hit with over 100,000 copies sold. Duke Ellington is born. William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory are founders of the Irish Literary Theatre. Rudyard Kipling begins work on Just So Stories. Joseph Conrad writes Heart of Darkness, which will inspire the movie Apocalypse Now.

1900 — William Butler Yeats publishes The Shadowy Waters. Yvor Winters is born. Joseph Conrad writes Lord Jim. Thomas Hardy pens "The Darkling Thrush" and dates it December 31, 1900, which he considers to be the last day of the old century. Queen Victoria died a few days later, marking the end of the Victorian Era.

Our top ten poets of Early Modernism: James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Dowson, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, William Butler Yeats

Early Modernism and the Edwardian Period (1901-1910)

1901 — Approximate beginning time for American country music and jazz. Sears, Roebuck and Co. is selling record players to the public, setting the stage for the coming explosion of record sales. Charles Booth's performance of J. Bodewalt Lange's "Creole Blues" is recorded for the new Victor label. This is the first acoustic recording of ragtime to be made commercially available. Laura Riding is born. King Edward VII assumes the British throne, beginning the Edwardian Period.

1902 — Thomas Hardy publishes Poems of the Past and Present. Alfred Noyes publishes The Loom of Years. Hilda Doolittle, aka H.D., meets and befriends Ezra Pound. Ogden Nash is born, synchronistically, in the same year as the earliest-published American limerick, which appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger: This is the popular limerick that starts "There once was a man from Nantucket." Victor Records issues the first known recording of black music, "Camp Meeting Shouts." Pianist Jelly Roll Morton claims to have invented jazz this year. Buddy Bolden is another candidate, as he creates a fusion of blues and ragtime. Henry James publishes The Wings of the Dove.

1903 — Wilbur and Orville Wright fly the first airplane at Kitty Hawk. William Butler Yeats publishes In the Seven Woods. Countee Cullen, an American poet, is born. W. C. Handy sees a bluesman playing a guitar with a knife (the first "pick"?). A plaque bearing the sonnet "The New Colossus" by Manhattan socialite Emma Lazarus is mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, greeting newcomers with the lines, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman. Henry James publishes The Ambassadors. Samuel Butler's posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh "attacked all the major doctrines of his day."

1904 — Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts. Christina Rossetti's Poetical Works. Algernon Charles Swinburne's A Channel Passage and Other Poems. Carl Sandburg's In Restless Ecstasy. Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, is born. Henry James publishes The Golden Bowl.

1905 — Albert Einstein presents his Special Theory of Relativity. Vachel Lindsay peddles his poems on the street, makes 13 cents, and is ecstatic. Ernest Dowson's The Poems of Ernest Dowson. Oscar Wilde's De Profundis (posthumous). Paul Laurence Dunbar's Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow. George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara.

1906 — Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman." Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts II.

1907 — James Joyce's Chamber Music. Sara Teasdale's Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems. Rudyard Kipling, an English poet and novelist, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. W. H. Auden, an English poet, is born. Buddy Bolden is committed to a mental institution without having ever recorded any music. The first wireless broadcast of classical music is produced in New York. Rudyard Kipling becomes the first English language writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, and the youngest at age 42. Ezra Pound is forced to leave a teaching position at Wabash College after offering a stranded chorus girl tea and his bed.

1908 — Ezra Pound leaves America for London. Pound's A Lume Spento, a collection of poems he later called "stale cream puffs." Pound, a transplanted American, is considered by many to be the father of English modernism. William Butler Yeats publishes The Collected Works in Verse and Prose. Yeats and Maude Gonne finally consummate their relationship in Paris, but the relationship does not last. Thomas Hardy publishes The Dynasts III. Theodore Roethke, an American poet, is born. Alcohol is banned in North Carolina and Georgia, presaging Prohibition.

1909 — Two poems published by T. E Hulme are considered to be the beginning of the early modernist movement called Imagism. Hulme forms the Secession Club with F. S. Flint and other poets. Ezra Pound soon joins the club. The poets discuss free verse and employing the methods of Oriental verse forms such as haiku and tanka. Pound publishes Personae and Exultations. Pound meets William Butler Yeats; Pound becomes Yeats's secretary. William Carlos Williams publishes Poems. Joseph Conrad completes The Secret Sharer. Robert Peary reaches the North Pole.

1910 — Rudyard Kipling writes his most famous poem, "If." Ford Madox Ford publishes Poems from London. Charles Olson, an American poet, is born. The NAACP is founded. Mark Twain dies. E. M. Forster's novel Howard's End. Marie Curie isolates radium. King George V assumes the British throne, beginning the Georgian Period. Virginia Woolf writes that "In or about December 1910, human character changed." The change became known as "modernism" (one aspect of modernism is that the "complexity of modern urban life must be reflected in literary form.")

Our top ten Modernist poets: E. E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, Louise Bogan, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens (#1)

The Georgian Period (1910-1936), World War I and the Modernists

1911 — Georgian poets include Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Harold Monro, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Vita Sackville-West. Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, who writes under the pen name "Guillaume Apollinaire," is suspected in the theft of the Mona Lisa from The Louvre museum in Paris and is imprisoned for six days. Ezra Pound's Canzoni is published in London. Irving Berlin completes his first hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." The birth of the American playwright Tennessee Williams.

1912 — Harriet Munroe founds the literary journal Poetry, influenced by Ezra Pound as a foreign editor. Pound, H.D. and Richard Aldington work out the principles of Imagist poetry. The first Imagist poems and essays appear in Poetry. Ironically "modernism" involved retreats to the past: Pound looked back to Confucius; T. S. Eliot to Dante; James Joyce to Homer; Lawrence to primitive tribes. The Titanic sinks, inspiring Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain." Rudyard Kipling publishes his Collected Poems. Walter de la Mare publishes The Listeners and Other Poems. Robinson Jeffers publishes Flagons and Apples. Edna St. Vincent Millay publishes Renascence. Elinor Wylie publishes Incidental Numbers. Northrop Frye is born. The "father of the blues," pianist W. C. Handy, publishes songs titled "Memphis Blues" and helps inaugurate a new style based on rural black folk music.

1913 — D. H. Lawrence's Love Poems. Ezra Pound's Des Imagistes. Notable imagist poets include Pound, Hulme, F. S. Flint, H. D., Aldington and Amy Lowell.  Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London, where Ezra Pound and Robert Frost will eventually meet. Wallace Stevens and his wife, Elsie, rent a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph Weinman, who makes a bust of Elsie; her image later is used on the artist's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design. Rabindranath Tagore is awarded the Nobel prize in literature. D. H. Lawrence publishes Love Poems and Others. The word "jazz" first appears in print. Robert Bridges is appointed British Poet Laureate.

1914 — Great Britain enters World War I by declaring war on Germany. Famous war poets would include Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Wilfred Owen. The Panama Canal opens to commercial traffic. Ezra Pound marries English artist Dorothy Shakespear at St Mary Abbots church, Kensington, London. T. S. Eliot meets Pound for the first time, in London. Pound is particularly taken with Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and writes that Eliot "actually trained and modernized himself on his own." Pound and Eliot would become leading voices of English modernism. Edward Thomas makes the English railway journey which inspires his poem "Adlestrop" en route to meet Robert Frost. BLAST, a short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement, is founded with the publication of the first of its total of two editions, edited by Wyndham Lewis in collaboration with Pound. J. R. R. Tolkien writes a poem about Eärendil, the first appearance of his mythopoeic Middle-earth legendarium that will, in time, spawn the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Robert Frost publishes North of Boston. Wallace Stevens has his first major publication, "Phases" in Poetry at age 35. Carl Sandburg publishes "Chicago" in Poetry. Dylan Thomas, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman are born. W.C. Handy writes St. Louis Blues.

1915 — The last issue of Blast includes the first poems of T. S. Eliot to be published in England. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is published with the help of Ezra Pound by Poetry. Pound completes the first section of his Cantos. Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out. Herbert Read publishes Songs of Chaos. John McCrea publishes "In Flanders Fields." Edgar Lee Masters publishes Spoon River Anthology. Billie Holliday, an African-American singer, is born. Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity.

1916 — Thomas Hardy's Selected Poems. D. H. Lawrence's Amores. Edward Thomas's first published poetry collection, Six Poems, under the pseudonym Edward Eastway. William Butler Yeats's "Easter, 1916." Yeats also writes one of his loveliest poems, "The Wild Swans at Coole" at the Coole Park estate of his patron Lady Gregory. Robert Frost's Mountain Interval, includes his famous poem "The Road Not Taken," written about Edward Thomas. Carl Sandburg publishes Chicago Poems, including his best-known poem, "Chicago." W. H. Davies publishes Selected Poems. John Ciardi, an American poet, is born. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia will have worldwide repercussions. George Bernard Shaw's popular play Pygmalion.

1917 — The U.S. enters World War I and begins to dominate international affairs. More than 200,000 black men will serve in the U.S. armed forces in segregated units; they can fight and die for their country, but are not equal citizens. When William Butler Yeats proposes to Maude Gonne and is rejected yet again, he then proposes to her daughter Iseult Gonne, and is also rejected!

1918 — Wilfred Owen writes his graphic anti-war poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est." He dies just one week before the armistice that ends WWI. Tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins tours with blues singer Mamie Smith and begins to develop a unique style of playing. The black singer, actor, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson graduates first in his class from Rutgers University. Robert Bridges publishes the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins posthumously.

1919 — George Gershwin's first and biggest hit is "Swanee." It is introduced by the singer Al Jolson, famous for performing in blackface. Physicist Ernest Rutherford, known as the father of nuclear physics, discovers a way to split atoms. The Original Dixieland Jass Band performs in London.

1920 — Edna St. Vincent Millay's "First Fig." Jazz is made popular by musicians like Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. The first blues record is recorded on Valentine's Day (February 14, 1920) when Mamie Smith, a black vaudeville performer, cuts "Crazy Blues." The records sells "phenomenally" well and record companies are soon "beating the bushes for any black woman who can sing." Women's suffrage is adopted in the U.S.

1921 — Adolf Hitler is elected leader of the Nazi Party in Germany.

1922 — T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (a major text of English modernism). Edward Arlington Robinson wins the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The jazz pianist William "Count" Basie makes his first recordings. The first commercial recordings of what was considered country music were "Arkansas Traveler" and "Turkey in the Straw" by fiddlers Henry Gilliland & A.C. (Eck) Robertson on June 30, 1922 at the office of Victor Records in New York. They were Confederate veterans playing "hillbilly music." William Butler Yeats becomes a senator of the Irish Free State.

1923 — Wallace Stevens's Harmonium. William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." W. B. Yeats wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Edna St. Vincent Millay wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, the defining performers of classic blues, make their recording debuts. Ralph Peer of Okeh records the hillbilly music of Fiddlin' John Carson in an empty loft in Atlanta. Hiram King "Hank" Williams is born in Olive, Alabama. He will become country music's greatest icon and most imitated performer.

1924 — The birth of the American writer and social critic James Baldwin (1924-1987). Robert Frost wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Robinson Jeffers' poem "Shine, Perishing Republic." E. M. Forster writes his best-known novel, A Passage to India.

1925 — Amy Lowell wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. E. E. Cummings receives the Dial Award. In Nashville the Grand Ole Opry begins radio broadcasts, bringing country and western music to the masses. Blind Lemon Jefferson is first recorded; he will become the dominant blues figure of the late 1920s and the first star of folk blues. Virginia Woolf publishes her novel Mrs Dalloway.

*1926 — The birth of the American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), the author of "Howl" and perhaps the greatest and most influential of the Beat poets. Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues.

1927 — Show Boat becomes the first hugely popular American musical comedy. Jimmie Rogers, the "father of country music," appears on a radio station for the first time, in Ashville, North Carolina. Rogers then records "Blue Yodel," better known as "T for Texas" and is catapulted to stardom. The Carter family, another country music group, also makes its first recordings. They would employ a black man to find black tunes for them to use. It would be the convergence of black music and country music that would eventually "fuse" into rock and roll in the hands of artists like Elvis Presley. Virginia Woolf publishes her novel To the Lighthouse. Wyndham Lewis's play The Wild Body.

1928 — Edward Arlington Robinson wins his third Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Virginia Woolf publishes her novel Orlando. Thomas Hardy dies and is buried at the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Or rather, his ashes are buried there and his heart is buried at Stinsford with his wife Emma. (Shades of David Livingston!)

1929 — The Great Depression cripples the American economy, hurting the sales of books, phonographs and records. Virginia Woolf publishes her book-length essay A Room of One's Own.

1930 — Hart Crane's The Bridge. Conrad Aiken wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas writes his first poem, around age 15. Many of his most famous poems were written as a teenager. Years later, Bob Dylan would take his assumed last name from Thomas's first.

1931 — E. E. Cummings writes the great modernist anti-war poem "i sing of Olaf glad and big."

1933 — Archibald MacLeish wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1934 — Adolf Hitler becomes dictator of Germany.

1936 — Debut of the electric guitar; the dawn of the rock 'n' roll age. Legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson begins his short recording career. Rudyard Kipling dies and is buried at the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. King George V dies, ending the Georgian Period.

World War II, the Cold War, Modernism and Postmodernism (1937-Present)

1939 — Great Britain enters World War II. Eddie Durham records the first music featuring the electric guitar; it will influence the development of the blues, which will in turn influence rock'n'roll.

*1941 — T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." The debut of FM radio stations. Alan Lomax records McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, at Stovall's Farm in Mississippi.

*1942 — Wallace Stevens's Of Modern Poetry. The first award of a gold record for a million-selling hit went to Glenn Miller for "Chatanooga Choo-Choo."

*1943 — Allen Ginsberg graduates from high school, where he fell under the spell of Walt Whitman's poetry.

*1945 — The end of World War II. Louise Bogan is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Allen Ginsberg joins the Merchant Marine in order to pay his tuition at pricey Columbia University. At Columbia, Ginsberg meets other writers who will eventually become known as the Beats, including Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

*1946 — Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish." Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill."

*1948 — T. S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. W. H. Auden wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Leonie Adams is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Columbia Records introduces the LP ("long playing") vinyl record, or "album." Allen Ginsberg has his "auditory vision" of William Blake; Ginsberg would become the foremost Beat poet.

*1951 — Carl Sandburg wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed uses the term "rock 'n' roll" to promote rhythm and blues to white audiences. Muddy Waters is the king of the blues singers.

*1955 — Black artists. sometimes employing racy lyrics, begin to hit the pop charts: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, the Platters. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a precursor of rap and modern performance poetry. Louise Bogan wins the Bollingen award.

*1957 — San Francisco book publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti is arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's free verse poem "Howl." The landmark obscenity trial (and not-guilty verdict) essentially leads to the end of U.S. government censorship.

*1962 — Bob Zimmerman changes his name to Bob Dylan, taking his new last name from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's first. James Brown records "Live At The Apollo." Brown’s drummer Clayton Fillyau introduces a sound now known as the break beat, which would later inspire the b-boy movement, and rap.

*1963 — William Carlos Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

1969 — Woodstock features folk and rock poets Arlo Guthrie; Joan Baez; John Fogerty; Sly Stone; Janis Joplin; Jimi Hendrix; and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Hendrix steals the show by playing a hard rock version of "The Star Spangled Banner" on his electric Fender Stratocaster. (But the Archies maintain the number one position on the charts with the pop hit "Sugar, Sugar.") Johnny Cash, who had problems with the law himself, performs for the inmates of San Quentin.

*1972 — The earliest "rap" musical events are held in the Bronx.

1973 — Great Britain joins the European Union. Daniel Hoffman is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. An estimated one billion viewers watch Elvis Presley's TV concert Aloha from Hawaii. The film American Graffiti is the first major movie about rock 'n' roll.

1974 — Robert Lowell wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Stanley Kunitz is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. The debut of disco music.

1975 — Queen releases the single "Bohemian Rhapsody" which features surreal, ultra-modernistic lyrics. It is followed by the album A Night at the Opera. Bruce Springsteen is the reigning rock poet with "Born to Run." Patti Smith is the pioneer of punk music with "Horses."

1976 — Robert Hayden is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art." James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.

1977 — The movie Saturday Night Fever popularizes disco and makes the Bee Gees major stars. Elvis Presley dies. Steven Biko, a black South African student leader and anti-apartheid activist, dies while in police custody, apparently the victim of a savage beating. An international outcry arises.

1978 — William Meredith is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Sony introduces the Walkman and the concept of personal, portable music. The debut of hip-hop music, which is very close to poetry and rap. The debut of Soul Train.

1979 — The Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper's Delight" is released; it becomes the first rap/hip-hop song/poem to reach the Billboard's Top 40. Robert Penn Warren wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

1980 — Blondie has the first white rap/hip-hop hit with "Rapture."

1981 — Maxine Kumin is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. MTV debuts with innovative music videos.

1982 — Sylvia Plath wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collected poems. Anthony Hecht is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Michael Jackson's Thriller becomes the biggest-selling album of all time. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, based on poems written by T. S. Eliot, becomes the longest-running Broadway musical of all time. Nineteen-year-old Occidental College student Barack Obama publishes his poem, "Pop," in the school's literary magazine.

1983 — Compact discs begin to replace vinyl records. Madonna has her first hits with "Holiday," "Borderline" and "Lucky Star." Michael Jacksons wows the MTV world with his first public moonwalk during a live performance of "Billie Jean," but the "backslide" had actually been around since the 1930's when it was called the "Buzz" by Cab Calloway.

1984 — Reed Whittemore is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for the second time, on an interim basis. Robert Fitzgerald is later appointed Poet Laureate. Marvin Gaye, who wrote "Father, father, there's no need to escalate" is shot and killed by his father, a preacher. Prince wins an Oscar for the score to "Purple Rain." Madonna becomes a pop star with "Like a Virgin."

1985 — Gwendolyn Brooks is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Freddy Mercury and Queen steal the show at Live Aid.

1986 — President Ronald Reagan borrows lines from the James Magee Jr. poem "High Flight" in his Oval Office address to comfort a grieving nation following the Challenger disaster, saying the crew had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God." Robert Penn Warren is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for the second time.

1987 — Joseph Brodsky wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Richard Wilbur is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

1988 — Howard Nemerov is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for the second time. Michael Jackson buys a ranch and calls it Neverland.

1989 — Richard Wilbur wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

1990 — Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mark Strand is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

1991 — Nirvana's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," makes grunge cool. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, dies from complications of AIDS.

1992 — Derek Walcott wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mona Van Duyn is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

1993 — Maya Angelou, the great granddaughter of an Arkansas slave, becomes the second poet to read at a presidential inauguration when she delivers "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's swearing-in. Rita Dove is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. The Who's rock opera Tommy debuts on Broadway. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana have an epic moment on MTV Unplugged.

1995 — Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature; Philip Levine wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Simple Truth. Robert Hass is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

1996 — Rap poet Eminem releases his debut album, Infinite.

1997 — Robert Pinksy is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Elton John sings "Candle In The Wind" with revised lyrics for the funeral of Princess Diana in Westminster Abby; it quickly becomes the all-time global best-selling single.

1999 — Gunter Grass, a German poet, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

2000 — Stanley Kunitz is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for the second time. The Internet begins to transform music, poetry and art. The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou rekindles an interest in bluegrass music with the hit "Man of Constant Sorrow."

2001 — Following the September 11th attacks, poems are pinned to makeshift memorials and circulate on the internet. "In times of crisis it's interesting that people don't turn to the novel or say, "We should all go out to a movie," then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins told The New York Times after the tragedy. "It's always poetry." Billy Collins is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Apple releases the iPod, a portable MP3 player.

2003 — Louise Gluck is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. Apple introduces its iTunes online store.

2004 — Ted Kooser is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2005 — Ted Kooser wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

2006 — Donald Hall is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2007 — Charles Simic is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2008 — Kay Ryan is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2009 — W. S. Merwin wins his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Michael Jackson dies in the middle of his comeback tour.

2010 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Versed by Rae Armantrout. W. S. Merwin is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2011 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Kay Ryan. Philip Levine is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2012 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars. Natasha Trethewey is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2013 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap.

2014 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Vijay Seshadri for 3 Sections. Charles Wright is appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

2015 — The Pulitzer Prize for poetry is awarded to Gregory Pardlo for Digest.

2016 — Great Britain leaves the European Union in a movement known as "Brexit." Donald Trump is elected president of the United States in a shocking upset.

2017 — Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, buys a majority stake in The Atlantic.

And who can guess what the future will hold? ...

Related Pages in Chronological Order: Song of Amergin, Caedmon's Hymn, Bede's Death Song, Deor's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, Anglo-Saxon Riddles and Kennings, How Long the Night, Ballads, Sumer is Icumen in, Fowles in the Frith, Ich am of Irlaunde, Tom O'Bedlam's Song, Now Goeth Sun Under Wood, Pity Mary, Sweet Rose of Virtue, Lament for the Makaris

The HyperTexts