Seventeenth-century British poetry, 1603-1660 - John Peter Rumrich

A time of political and social unrest in England, this
period produced some of the greatest poetry in
English. This volume includes the major
poets-John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell-the major women
writers of the era-Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth,
Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, and
Katherine Philips-and nineteen other poets
essential to an understanding of English
literature in the seventeenth century. The poems are accompanied by headnotes and explanatory
annotations. "Criticism" is divided
into two sections. The first, "Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Criticism," includes
commentary by contemporary poets and
biographers, among them Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson. The second, "Recent
Criticism," brings together twenty critical examinations of the period and its poets,
including essays by T. S. Eliot, Janel Mueller,
Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Joseph Summers,
Laurence Babb, Gerald Hammond, Eavan Boland, Leah Marcus, and William Kerrigan. A Selected
Biography is also included.