The English reader : what every literate person needs to know / edited by Diane Ravitch and Michael Ravitch.

Includes index.

Introduction -- Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) -- Speech on the eve of facing the Spanish Armada -- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) -- Sonnets -- 18 : Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? -- 29 : When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes -- 30 : When to the sessions of sweet silent thought -- 65 : Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea -- 73 : That time of year thou mayst in me behold -- 94 : They that have power to hurt and will do none -- 97 : How like a winter hath my absence been -- 116 : Let me not to the marriage of true minds -- 129 : The expense of spirit in a waste of shame -- Plays -- Hamlet : To be, or not to be -- Julius Caesar : Friends, Romans, countrymen -- As You Like It : All the world's a stage -- Henry V : We few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- Macbeth : Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow -- Richard II : This royal throne or kings, this sceptred isle -- Cymbeline : Fear no more the heat o' the sun -- The Tempest : Full fathom five they father lies -- Scarborough Fair.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) -- From The Faerie Queene -- Easter -- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) -- The passionate shepherd to his love -- Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) -- The nymph's reply to the shepherd -- Nature, that hath washed her hands in milk -- Greensleeves -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- From Novum Organum -- Of studies -- John Donne (1572-1631) -- Song : Go and catch a falling star -- The sun rising -- The anniversary -- A valediction : forbidding mourning -- A lecture upon the shadow -- Holy sonnet X -- From meditation 17 : No man is an island.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637) -- Oak and lily -- Oh, that joy so soon should waste! -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- From Leviathan -- King James Bible (1611) -- Job 41 -- Psalm 23 -- Ecclesiastes 3 -- Song of Solomon 2 -- Isaiah 40 -- Matthew 5 -- Corinthians 13 -- Robert Herrick (1591-1674) -- To daffodils -- To the virgins, to make much of time -- George Herbert (1593-1633) -- Redemption -- Prayer (1) -- The collar -- Love (3) -- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) -- From Hydriotaphia : Urne-Burial -- Barbara Allen -- John Milton (1608-1674) -- ON his blindness -- From Paradise Lost -- From Areopagitica : a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing -- Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) -- Of charity, or the love of God -- The two brothers -- Richard Lovelace (1618-1657) -- To Althea, from prison -- To Lucasta, on going to the wars -- Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) -- To his coy mistress -- The mower to the glow-worms -- The definition of love.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) -- The heavenly footman -- Lord Randal -- John Dryden (1631-1700) -- Fairest isle -- From Mac Flecknoe -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- From Second treatise on government -- The girl I left behind me -- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) -- From Principia -- O God, our help in ages past -- Joy to the world -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) -- A modest proposal -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) -- From An essay on criticism -- From An essay on man -- Rule, Britannia! -- John Wesley (1703-1791) -- From The Wilderness State -- Jesus, lover of my soul -- William Pitt (1708-1778) -- Speech to the House of Commons, January 14, 1766 -- Heart of Oak -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) -- Fame -- Thomas Gray (1716-1771) -- Elegy written in a country churchyard -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) -- From The Wealth of Nations -- God save the king -- Edmund Burke (1729?-1797) -- From Reflections on the Revolution in France -- Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-1774) -- The deserted village -- William Cowper (1731-1800) -- The solitude of Alexander Selkirk -- The castaway.

William Blake (1757-1827) -- The lamb -- The tyger -- The human abstract -- A poison tree -- How to know love from deceit -- From The Four Zoas -- From Milton -- Auguries of innocence -- From The Marriage of heaven and Hell -- Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) -- From A Vindication of the Rights of Women -- Robert Burns (1759-1796) -- O, my luve's like a red, red rose -- To a mouse -- My heart's in the Highlands -- Auld lang syne -- William Wilberforce (1759-1833) -- Speech to the House of Commons, May 12, 1789 -- Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) -- From An Essay on the Principle of Population -- Amazing Grace -- William Wordsworth (1770-1850) -- I wandered lonely as a cloud -- My heart leaps up -- Composed upon Westminster Bridge 1802 -- Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey -- A slumber did my spirit seal -- It is a beauteous evening -- The world is too much with us -- Ode : on intimations of immortality from recollections of childhood -- From The Prelude.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) -- Lucy Ashton's song -- From The Lay of the last minstrel ("Breathes there the man with soul so dead") -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- Kubla Khan -- The rime of the ancient mariner -- Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) -- Rose Aylmer -- Finis -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) -- Man is a toad-eating animal -- Lord Byron (1788-1824) -- She walks in beauty -- We'll go no more a-roving -- On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year -- From Don Juan -- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) -- Ode to the west wind -- Ozymandias -- Stanzas written in dejection near Naples -- Music when soft voices die -- When the lamp is shattered -- John Clare (1793-1864) -- Lines written in Northampton asylum -- Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) -- Casabianca -- John Keats (1795-1821) -- From Endymion -- When I have fears -- Ode on a Grecian urn -- Ode to a nightingale -- To autumn -- Bright star! Would I were stedfast as thou art -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) -- Labour -- Thomas Hood (1799-1845) -- The song of the shirt -- I remember, I remember.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) -- From The Idea of a University -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) -- How do I love thee? -- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) -- From On liberty -- Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) -- From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) -- The Lady of Shalott -- Ulysses -- Break, break, break -- From In Memoriam -- The charge of the Light Brigade -- Crossing the bar -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) -- From The Origin of Species -- Edward Lear (1812-1888) -- From The Book of Nonsense -- The owl and the pussycat -- Robert Browning (1812-1889) -- Home-thoughts, from abroad -- Love among the ruins -- Rabbi Ben Ezra -- Emily Brontë (1818-1848) -- Last lines -- Fall, leaves, fall -- The night is darkening round me -- John Ruskin (1819-1900) -- From Modern Painters -- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) -- Dover Beach -- Growing old -- From Culture and anarchy..

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) -- From A liberal education and where to find it -- I know where I'm going -- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) -- From Physics and Politics -- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) -- A birthday -- Song ("When I am dead, my dearest") -- Goblin market -- Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) -- Jabberwocky -- The walrus and the carpenter -- The white knight's song -- Father William -- William Morris (1834-1896) -- From How we live and how we might live -- Walter Pater (1839-1894) -- From The Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry -- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) -- The darkling thrush -- I look into my glass -- Shut out that moon -- Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) -- The garden of Proserpine -- A match -- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) -- God's grandeur -- The windhover : to Christ our Lord -- Pied beauty -- No worst, there is none -- I wake and feel the fell of dark -- W.E. Henley (1849-1903) -- Invictus -- England, my England -- The Major General's song.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) -- Aes triplex -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) -- The ballad of Reading Gaol -- From The Decay of Lying -- Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) -- Speech in New York, October 21, 1913 -- A.E. Houseman (1859-1936) -- Loveliest of threes, the cherry now -- To an athlete dying young -- With rue my heart is laden -- Stars, I have seen them fall -- The laws of God, the laws of man -- David Lloyd George (1863-1945) -- Speech at Queen's Hall, London, September 21, 1914 -- There'll always be an England -- Roger Casement (1864-1916) -- Speech at the Old Baily, 1916 -- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) -- If -- Cities and thrones and powers -- Gunga Din -- Recessional -- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) -- Among school children -- An Irish airman foresees his death -- To a friend whose work has come to nothing -- Sailing to Byzantium -- The second coming -- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) -- On the institution of the family -- Edward Thomas (1878-1917) -- No one so much as you -- Aspens.

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) -- From Two cheers for democracy -- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) -- From A Room of One's Own -- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) -- From Why the novel matters -- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) -- The soldier -- Keep the home fires burning -- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) -- The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- Gerontion -- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) -- Futility -- Anthem for doomed youth -- Dulce et decorum est -- George Orwell (1903-1950) -- From England your England -- W.H. Auden (1907-1973) -- Stop all the clocks -- In memory of W.B. Yeats -- September 1, 1939 -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) -- In my craft or sullen art -- Do not go gentle into that good night -- Phillip Larkin (1922-1985) -- Going, going -- First sight -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965) -- Speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940 -- Speech to the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 -- Copyright -- Illustration credits -- Index.

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.