Front cover image for The English reader : what every literate person needs to know

The English reader : what every literate person needs to know

Diane Ravitch (Editor), Michael Ravitch (Editor)
From the Publisher: In this sequel to the best-selling The American Reader, mother-and-son team Diane and Michael Ravitch have gathered together the best and most memorable poems, essays, songs, and orations in English history, capturing in one compact volume writings that have shaped not only England, but democratic culture around the globe. Here are words that changed the world, words that inspired revolutions as well as lovers, dreamers, and singers, words that every educated person once knew-and should know today. Framed by two inspiring speeches-Queen Elizabeth before the invasion of the Spanish Armada and Winston Churchill during the dark days of World War II-the book features work by William Wordsworth and W.H. Auden, Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and many other extraordinary writers. Readers will find ardent love poems such as Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love" and Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" We also find more philosophical works such as Yeat's "The Second Coming" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." There are excerpts from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, and other influential thinkers. In addition, the book includes song lyrics ranging from "Greensleeves" to "Rule, Britannia," and works that, though not considered classics, were immensely popular in their day and capture the spirit of an era, such as W.E. Henley's "Invictus" ("I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul"). The editors also provide brief, fascinating biographies of each writer. An exquisite gift, The English Reader offers the best of the best-the soaring language and seminal ideas that fired the imagination of the English-speaking world
Print Book, English, 2006
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006
poetry
xxiii, 486 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780195077292, 0195077296
68624020
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Scarborough Fair
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
Christopher Marlowe (1564
1593)
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
Greensleeves
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
John Donne (1572
1631)
Ben Jonson (1573
1637)
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
King James Bible (1611)
Robert Herrick (1591
1674)
George Herbert (1593
1633)
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
Barbara Allen
John Milton (1608
1674)
Jeremy Taylor (1613
1667)
The two brothers
Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)
Andrew Marvell (1621
1678)
John Bunyan (1628-1688)
Lord Randal
John Dryden (1631
1700)
John Locke (1632
1704)
The girl i left behind me
Isaac Newton (1642
1727)
Our God, our help in ages past
Joy to the world
Jonathan Swift (1667
1745)
Alexander Pope (1688
1744)
Rule, Britannia
John Wesley (1703
1791)
Jesus, lover of my soul
William Pitt (1708
1778)
Heart of Oak
Samuel Johnson (1709
1784)
Thomas Gray (1716
1771)
Adam Smith (1723
1790)
God save the queen
Edmund Burke (1729
1797)
Oliver Goldsmith (1730
1774)
William Cowper (1731
1800)
William Blake (1757
1827)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1859
1897)
Robert Burns (1759
1796)
Auld lang syne
William Wilberforce (1759
1833)
Amazing Grace
William Wordsworth (1770
1850)
Sir Walter Scott (1771
1832)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772
1834)
Walter Savage Landor (1775
1824)
William Hazlitt (1778
1830)
Lord Byron (1788
1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792
1822)
John Clare (1793
1864)
Felicia Hemans (1793
1835)
John Keats (1795
1821)
Thomas Carlyle (1795
1881)
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
John Henry Newman (1801
1890)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806
1861)
John Stuart Mill (1806
1873)
Edward Fitzgerald (1809
1883)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809
1892)
Charles Darwin (1809
1882)
Edward Lear (1812
1888)
Robert Browning (1812
1889)
Emily Bronte (1818
1848)
John Ruskin (1819
1900)
Matthew Arnold (1822
1888)
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825
1895)
I know where I'm going
Walter Bagehot (1826
1877)
Christina Rossetti (1830
1894)
Lewis Carroll (1832
1898)
William Morris (1834
1896)
Walter Pater (1839
1894)
Thomas Hardy (1840
1928)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1843
1909)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844
1889)
W.E. Henley (1849
1903)
The Major General's song
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850
1894)
Oscar Wilde (1854
1900)
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858
1928)
A.E. Houseman (1859
1936)
David Lloyd George (1863
1945)
There'll always be an England
Roger Casement (1864
1916)
Rudyard Kipling (1865
1936)
William Butler Yeats (1865
1939)
G.K. Chesterton (1874
1936)
Edward Thomas (1878
1917)
E.M. Forster (1879
1970)
Virginia Woolf (1881
1941)
D.H. Lawrence (1885
1930)
Rupert Brooke (1887
1915)
Keep the home fires burning
T.S Eliot (1888
1965)
Wilfred Owen (1893
1918)
George Orwell (1903
1950)
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Phillip Larkin (1922- 1985)
Winston Churchill (1874
1965)
Includes index