English Authors

• Humanism's two primary goals: perfection of individual human character and reform of public evils
• Thomas More - statesman and author; wrote Utopia; executed by Henry VIII
• Philip Sidney - the ideal courtly poet of the Elizabethan Age; wrote Astrophel and Stella (first cycle of sonnets)
• Edmund Spenser - nine-line stanza (Spenserian Stanza), wrote The Faerie Queene (allegorical romance)
• Christopher Marlowe - first great English dramatist, most important Elizabethan dramatist before William Shakespeare
• John Donne - greatest writer of love poetry; wrote A Valediction; metaphysical
• Andrew Marvell - assistant of Milton; satirist; wrote To His Coy Mistress
• William Shakespeare - Bard of Avon; greatest of all dramatists; wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets; produced most varies and powerful body of work
• Ben Jonson - contemporary of Shakespeare; "not for an age but for a ALL TIME"; gift of satire; wrote Volpone
• John Milton - greatest English poet after Shakespeare; wrote Paradise Lost
• John Locke - founded the school of empiricism; wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Thomas Hobbes - provide a secular justification for the political state; wrote Leviathan
• Edward Gibbon - The History of the

  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (greatest historical work in English)
• John Dryden - heroic couplet; wrote Absalom and Achitophel
• William Congreve - ablest writer of comedy of the Restoration period; wrote Love for Love
• John Bunyan - wrote The Pilgrim's Progress; most famous religious allegories in English language
• Alexander Pope - refined the heroic couplet; wrote An Essay on Criticism; to err is human, to forgive divine
• Jonathan Swift - satirist and political pamphleteer; wrote Gulliver's Travels
• Daniel Dafoe - personal experiences; wrote Robinson Crusoe
• Samuel Johnson - Dictionary Johnson; wrote the Dictionary of the English Language
• Oliver Goldsmith - comedy She Stoops to Conquer
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan - finest development of the comedy of manners; wrote The Rivals
• Thomas Percy - wrote Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
• Samuel Richardson - wrote Pamela (an Epistolary)
• Henry Fielding - greatest novel is Tom Jones
• Tobias George Smollett - The Adventures of Roderick Random (first picaresque novel)
• Laurence Sterne - wrote The Life and Opinions

  of Tristram Shandy, great 18th-century masterpiece of English fiction
• Thomas Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
• William Blake - engraver; Songs of Innocence
• William Wordsworth - featured Coleridge; lyrical ballads; one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets; wrote The Prelude
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - a leader of the romantic movement; Kubla Khan
• Walter Scott - Scottish novelist and poet; wrote Ivanhoe (saxon life in medieval period)
• Lord George Gordon Noel Byron (Lord Byron) - wrote Don Juan (16 cantos, Epic)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley - husband of Mary Shelley; wrote Ode to a Skylark
• John Keats - most notable and important by any English poet (T.S. Elliot); "I am certain of nothing but the holiness..."; wrote The Autumn
• Thomas De Quincey - wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
• Thomas Babington Macaulay - wrote History of England
• John Henry Newman - outstanding religious thinker and essayist; leader of Oxford movement; wrote Apology for His Life
• Thomas Carlyle - scottish essayist; wrote Sartor Resartus
• Alfred Lord Tennyson - wrote Ulysses