Timeline of Major Literary Periods and Authors

Anglo-Saxon Period

449-1066

Anonymous

c. 8th-11th century; Major Work: Beowulf (c. 700-1000 AD)

Medieval Period

1066-1485

Geoffrey Chaucer

c. 1343-1400; Major Work: The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)

Sir Thomas Malory

c. 1415-1471; Major Work: Le Morte d'Arthur (completed 1470, published 1485)

Renaissance Period

1485-1625

Edmund Spenser

c. 1552-1599; Major Works: The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), Amoretti (1595)

Christopher Marlowe

1564-1593; Major Works: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1599), Doctor Faustus (1592)

William Shakespeare

1564-1616; Major Works: Hamlet (1600-1601), Sonnet 18 (1609), Macbeth (1606), Romeo and Juliet (1597)

John Donne

1572-1631; Major Works: Holy Sonnets (1633), Holy Sonnet 10 (1633)

Puritan Age / American Colonial Period

1625-1776

John Milton

1608-1674; Major Works: Paradise Lost (1667), On His Blindness (1655)

Anne Bradstreet

1612-1672; Major Work: The Author to Her Book (1678), The Tenth Muse (1650)

Jonathan Edwards

1703-1758; Major Work: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)

Restoration & 18th Century / American Neoclassical Period

1660-1798

John Dryden

1631-1700; Major Work: A Song for St. Cecilia's Day (1687)

Alexander Pope

1688-1744; Major Work: Ode on Solitude (1700), The Rape of the Lock (1712)

Benjamin Franklin

1706-1790; Major Work: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)

Philis Wheatley

1753-1784; Major Work: On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773)

Romantic Period

1798-1832

William Wordsworth

1770-1850; Major Works: Daffodils (1807), My Heart Leaps Up (1802), The Prelude (1850)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772-1834; Major Work: Kubla Khan (1816), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792-1822; Major Work: Ode to the West Wind (1820), Prometheus Unbound (1820)

John Keats

1795-1821; Major Work: Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), Ode to a Nightingale (1819)