If someone was to ask me, tell me the most concise best of English poetry featuring the great poets and poems, I would list the following (in approximate chronological order).
Anonymous
-“Sir Patrick Spence”
-“Edward”
-The Twa Corbies”
Geoffrey Chaucer
-Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English and Modern English)
William Shakespeare
–Complete Sonnets
Dramatic speeches including:
-John of Gaunt’s “This sceptred isle” speech from Richard II
-Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech
-Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech
-Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans” speech from Julius Caesar
-Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech
-Jacques’ “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It
-Portia’s “Quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice
John Donne
-“The Good-Morrow”
-“The Sun Rising”
-“The Canonization”
-“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
-“The Ecstasy”
-“Death, Be Not Proud”
-“Batter My Heart”
-“Hymn to My God, In My Sickness”
Thomas Gray
-“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
William Blake
–Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
William Wordsworth
-“She Was a Phantom of Delight”
-“Composed upon Westminster Bridge”
-“The World Is Too Much with Us”
-“To the Daffodils”
-“Tintern Abbey”
-“The Solitary Reaper”
-“Ode: Intimations on Immorality”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-“Kubla Khan”
-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-“To a Skylark”
-“Ozymandias”
John Keats
-“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
-“When I Have Fears”
-“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
-“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
-“Ode to a Nightingale”
-“The Eve of St. Agnes”
-“To Autumn”
Alfred Lord Tennyson
-“The Lady of Shalott”
-“Ulysses”
-“The Charge of the Light Brigade”
-“The Lotus Eaters”
–In Memoriam
Robert Browning
-“My Last Duchess”
-“Porphyria’s Lover”
-“The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxid’s Church”
-“Fra Lippo Lippi”
-“Andrea Del Sarto”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
-“How Do I Love Thee?”
Oscar Wilde
-“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
W.B. Yeats
-“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
-“The Song of the Wandering Aengus”
-“The Wild Swans of Coole”
-“Sailing to Byzantium”
-“Leda and the Swan”
-“Byzantium”
-“The Second Coming”
-“The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
A.E. Housman
–A Shropshire Lad
Wilfred Owen
–“Dulce et Decorum Est”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, “Arms and the Boy”
T.S. Eliot
-“The Waste Land”
-Four Quartets
-“Preludes”
-“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
-“Portrait of a Lady”
-“The Journey of the Magi”
John Masefield
-“Sea Fever”
Walter de la Mare
-“The Listeners”
Alfred Noyes
-“The Highwayman”
W.H. Auden
-“O Where Are You Going?”
-“As I Walked out One Evening”
-“Autumn Song”
-“There Will Be No Peace”
-“Musee des Beaux Arts”
-“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
-“The Unknown Citizen”
-“O What Is That Sound?”
-“Stop All the Clocks”
“If I Could Tell You”
Virginia Woolf
–The Waves
Dylan Thomas
-“The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”
-“The Hand That Signed the Paper”
-“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”
-“The Hunchback in the Park”
-“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
-“A Winter’s Tale”
-“In My Craft or Sullen Art”
-“Ballad of the Long-legged Bait”
-“Fern Hill”
-“I See the Boys of Summer”
-“Lament”
–A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Ted Hughes
-“Thought Fox”, “Hawk Roosting”, “View of a Pig”
–Birthday Letters
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
–Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (with George Harrison’s Within You, Without You”) especially “A Day in the Life”, “When I’m Sixty-four”
-“Back in the USSR”
-“Come Together”
-“Eleanor Rigby”
-“I Am the Walrus”
-“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
-“Penny Lane”
-“Rocky Raccoon”
-“Strawberry Fields Forever”
-“The Ballad of John and Yoko”
Ray Davies (0f The Kinks)
-“A Well-Respected Man”
-“Sunny Afternoon”
-“Dedicated Follower of Fashion”
-“Dead End Street”
-“Lola”
-“Victoria”
-“Waterloo Sunset”
