Our Booklist

This is the list we're working from, and I would be witty about it but we're in New York and we have other things to do.

Please feel free to make suggestions on additions or favorite translations. Remember, our constraints: Beowulf through Virginia Woolf. Nothing really after, though I sneaked Lolita on there because it's important to me.

Edit: We stop at Virginia Woolf because the point of this is to get an education in the foundations of English-language literature, and because we only have so much time in our lives. And because Serena's advisor told her she could stop there.

Besides, how can you not love the fearful symmetry?

Original Booklist:
Beowulf
Everyman
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
Piers Plowman
Le Morte d’Arthur
Volpone
Ben Jonson's Elegy to Shakespeare
"Defense of Poesy"
Edward II
Tamburlaine
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Utopia
The Tempest
Julius Caesar
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Sonnets
The Faerie Queen
Amoretti
John Donne's Holy Sonnets
John Donne's "Elegy 20"
John Donne's "The Bait"
John Donne's "The Flea"
Paradise Lost
“To His Coy Mistress”
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
The Way of the World
Pilgrim’s Progress
All for Love
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
"A Modest Proposal"
"A Description of a City Shower"
Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope's “Rape of the Lock,”
Alexander Pope's "The Dunciad"
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man"
Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism"
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson
She Stoops to Conquer
The Vicar of Wakefield
Tom Jones
Tristam Shandy
Mary Shelley's “Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Vanity Fair
»Moby Dick (Annemarie suggested it!)
Samuel Coleridge's “Kublai Khan”
Samuel Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight”
Sense and Sensibility
Childe Harold'd Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Wuthering Heights
Percy Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”
Percy Shelley's “Defence of Poetry”
Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias”
Percy Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Walter Scott's “Marmion”
Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia
Mysteries of Udolpho
Hard Times
Oliver Twist
Tale of Two Cities
John Keats' “To a Nightingale”
John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
John Keats' “Fall of Hyperion”
William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
William Wordsworth's“I Wandered Lonely as Cloud”
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Importance of Being Earnest
Picture of Dorian Gray
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese”
Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess”
Robert Browning's “Fra Lippo Lippi”
Alfred Tennyson's “In Memoriam, AH.H.”
Alfred Tennyson's “Ulysses”
Alfred Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade”
Alfred Tennyson's “Lady of Shalott”
Jonathan Edwards' “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God”
Anne Bradstreet's “A Dialogue Between Old England and New”
Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Anne Bradstreet's “The Author to Her Book"
Anne Bradstreet's "Upon the Birth of One of Her Children”
Moby Dick
Bartleby the Scrivener
House of the Seven Gables
The Scarlet Letter
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny
Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson's “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”
Emily Dickinson's “I Felt a Funeral In my Brain”
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
Walt Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Walt Whitman's “Oh Captain, My Captain”
“Nature”
Walden
Diaries of Adam and Eve
Adventures of Huckberry Finn
Is Shakespeare Dead?
Margaret Fuller's “Women In the Nineteenth Century”
The Bostonians
Portrait of a Lady
Arms and the Man
Pgymalion
»Yellow Wallpaper (Annemarie, this was a good one, and one I totally spaced)
Howard’s End
The House of Mirth
To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Heart of Darkness
Ulysses
"The Dead"
"Araby"
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D.H. Lawrence's “Why the Novel Matters”
W.B. Yeats' “When You Are Old”
W.B. Yeats' "Easter 1916"
W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"
W.B. Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"
Langston Hughes' “The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Langston Hughes' "I, Too"
Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son"
Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B"
T.S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"
Robert Frost's “After Apple Picking”
Robert Frost's "Birches"
Robert Frost's "Design"
Robert Frost's "The Mending Wall"
A Moveable Feast
Hills Like White Elephants
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
This Side of Paradise
The Great Gatsby
The Sound and the Fury
“A Rose For Emily”
Mourning Becomes Electra
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Waiting for Godot
George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Grapes of Wrath
The End of the Affair
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues"
W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One"
W.H. Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant"
W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro”
Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach”
Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conscientious Objector"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Time Offers No Relief"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I Will Put Chaos Into 14 Lines"
Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas' “A Child’s Christmas In Wales”
Brave New World
Lolita

Recent Additions Since We Decided To Read Things Not Originally In English:
The Divine Comedy
The Oresteia
Medea
The Persians
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
Madame Bovary
Tartuffe
Candide
Faust
Death in Venice
Metamorphosis
Rilke (TBA)

Seamus Heaney, Poets Laureate, and big words

I'm trying to figure out whether Seamus Heaney is officially Ireland's Poet Laureate or not, and the internet is giving me very conflicting stories. I see news items in which he is referred to as such, but the Wikipedia doesn't even say that Ireland has a poet laureate.

I remember my classmates at the Drogheda Grammar School complaining about him, and I thought that they said he was the poet laureate. But now I'm not sure, and I've been looking it up for so long that the words "poet" and "laureate" have lost all meaning to me. Maybe he is, like, de facto poet laureate; my friend Tash says, "We have a Poet Laureate? First I've heard. Still, if it's anyone, it'll be him...."

He's Irish and a poet and a Nobel laureate, so I guess that's close enough.

This is the poem about which I specifically remember hearing complaints; they had to study it for the Leaving Cert. His wife is rummaging in a drawer, and she reminds him of a skunk. Now I feel like I should study Seamus Heaney. It's so easy to get sidetracked.

Should you be reading Seamus Heaney's introduction to his translation of Beowulf -- to return to the topic ostensibly at hand -- you may come across a number of unfamiliar words. Perhaps being a poet does not incline one to write clearly in prose, or perhaps I'm thinking of being an academic. In any case, here are some words that I encountered with which I was unfamiliar or only sort of familiar (you know, when you've read a word enough times that it makes sense to you in context, but then you realize that you couldn't define it if you were asked); I will regard this as practice for the verbal section of the GRE. Mmm... Latin.

All definitions are via dictionary.com and/or the Wikipedia; I sure miss Reed's OED subscription.

in illo tempore: "at that time"

effulgence: "A brilliant radiance."

tumulus: "An artificial hillock, especially one raised over a grave, particularly over the graves of persons buried in ancient times; a barrow." Or, in geology, "a domelike swelling or mound formed in congealed lava."

foundedness: Well, actually, dictionary.com doesn't know what he means by this. Nor do I. We'll get there...

lambency: "An appearance of reflected light"; the adjective lambent is defined as "flickering lightly over or on a surface," or "effortlessly light or brilliant," or simply "having a gentle glow; luminous." David said he knew this one because there is a video game in which you can get "lambent armor." Apparently I've missed a lot by not playing video games.

chthonic: "Of or pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth." Also, "pertaining to the earth; earthy." This makes more sense to me in context; Heaney seems to use it to mean something like "inherent" when he says that "the dragon... could be read as a projection of Beowulf's own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience" (Translator's Introduction, xxxi).

There are probably more, but those are all the ones I can think of for now. This is the sentence that got me started on this topic to begin with (Heaney is speaking of the dragon): "Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him" (Translator's introduction, xxx).

Heaney's meaning is clarified somewhat by the following sentence, in which he describes the dragon as "at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power..." (xxx). But really. This is what I mean about poets writing prose. He could have just said, "The dragon, having slept in the earth for a very long time, comes out all luminous and airborne (sparkly and flying!), which juxtaposition contributes to his impact and complexity in the reader's impression." Or even "DRAGON=AIR+FIRE+EARTH."

But no. Then I wouldn't get to brush up on my Latin roots.