Before 1900–probably even up to 1950–it is comparatively easy to prepare a defensible list of generally recognized masterpieces. A list of contemporary masterpieces is much more problematic. This list merely tries to suggest some authors and titles that have been well publicized and that seem to have been influential in establishing contemporary currents. The student should be aware of the ever-changing movements in contemporary drama, fiction, poetry, and criticism. But every student should know the classics and the Bible.

Part I

Ancients to 400 A.D.

Plays

Aeschylus, Agamemnon (c. 475 B.C., Greek)

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 534 B.C., Greek)

Euripides, Medea (c. 435 B.C., Greek)

Aristophanes, The Frogs (Lysistrata) (412 B.C., Greek)

Poetry: Epic and Mock-Epic

Homer, The Illiad (c. 9th century B.C., Greek)

Virgil, The Aeneid, Books I-VI (c. 25, B.C., Latin)

Criticism

Plato, Book X of The Republic (c. 373 B.C., Greek)

Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335-320 B.C., Greek)

Horace, "Ars Poetica" (c.8 B.C., Latin)

Longinus, "On the Sublime" (c. 250 A.D., Greek)

Part II

Medieval/Renaissance 400-1600 A.D.

Plays

Abraham and Isaac (c. 1450, English)

The Second Shepherd's Play (c. 1450, English)

Everyman (c. 1500, English)

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (c. 1590, English)

Shakespeare, I Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida ( 1598-1611, English)

Prose Fiction: Novels

Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-16, Spanish) (note Mentor abridged version)

Poetry: Epic and Mock Epic

Beowulf (modernized English version acceptable) (c. 1000, Old English)

Dante, The Divine Comedy: all of "Inferno," or of "Puratorio," or of "Paradiso" (c. 1307, Italian)

Spencer, The Faerie Queene, Book I (1500, English)

Poetry: Narrative, Dramatic, Philsophic, and Didactic

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (modernized English version acceptable) (c. 1375, English)

Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: "General Prologue." "Pardoner's Tale," "Nun's Priest's Tale," "Prioress's Tale," Prologue to Wife of Bath's Tale" (c. 1387-1400, English)

Ballads: "Edward," "Sir Patrick Spense," "The Twa Corbies," "Barbara Allen" (c. 15th century, English)

Poetry: Lyric and Elegiac

"The Wanderer," "The Dream of the Rood" (modern English version acceptable) (c. 900, Old English)

Wyatt, "Whoso List to Hunt," "They Flee From Me" (c. 1540, English) Sidney, "Leave Me, O Love" (c, 1585, English) Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (c. 1590, English) Spenser, "Epithalamion" (1595, English) Shakespeare, Sonnets 18,29,30,55,71,73,94,97,116,129,130,144 (c. 1592-1603, English)

Campion, "There is a Garden in Her Face" (c. 1617, English) Drayton, Sonnet 61 ("Since there's no help") from Idea's Mirrour (1619, English)

Jonson, "To Celia" ("Drink to me only with thine eyes"), "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare" (1616 & 1623, English) Herbert, "The Collar," "The Pulley" (c. 1630, English)

Donne, Song ("Go and catch a falling star"), Song ("Sweetest love, I do not go"), "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Ecstacy," "Holy Sonnet" ("Death, be not proud"), "The Canonization," (1633, English) Suckling, "Song" ("Why so pale and wan, fond lover?") (1639, English)

Herrick, "Corinna's Going A-Maying," "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" (1648, English)

Lovelace, "To Althea, from Prison," "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" (1649, English)

Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (c. 1650, English)

Criticism

Sidney, "An Apologie for Poetrie" (c. 1583, English)

Part III

Renaissance to Modern (1600-1850)

Plays

Jonson, Volpone (c.1616, English)

Moliere, Tartuffe (1664, French) (The Misanthrope, The Miser)

Congreve, The Way of the World (1700, English)

Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777, English) (The Rivals)

Prose Fiction: Novels

Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726-27, English)

Fielding, Tom Jones (1726-1727, English) (Joseph Andrews)

Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813, English)

Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847, English)

Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848, English)

Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850, American) (House of Seven Gables)

Prose Fiction: Short Stories

Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846, American) ("Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia")

Poetry: Epic and Mock-Epic

Milton, Paradise Lost (1667, English)

Pope, "The Rape of the Lock" (1714, English) ("The Dunciad")

Byron, Don Juan, Cantos I-IV (1819-21, English)

Poetry: Narrative, Dramatic, Philsophic, and Didactic

Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671, English)

Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel" (1681, English) and ("Mac Flecknoe")

Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749, English)

Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798, English)

Worsdworth, "Tintern Abbey," "Intimations of Immortality" (1798, English)

Bryant, "Thanatopsis" (1817, American)

Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820, English)

Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, English)

Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb...," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto" (1842-55, English)

Poetry: Lyric and Elegiac

Milton, "Lycidas," "On His Blindness," "On the Late Massacre in Piemont" (1632-1655, English)

Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751, English)

Burns, "To a Louse," "John Anderson, My Jo," "A Red, Red Rose" (1785-88, English)

Blake, "The Lamb," "The Tiger," "The Garden of Love" (1789-94, English)

Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (1798, English)

Wordsworth, sonnets: "London, 1802" ("Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour"), "Composed Upon Westminister Bridge" ("Earth has not anything to show more fair"), "The World Is Too Much With Us" (1802-07, English)

Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Ode to a Nightengale," "Ode to a Grecian Urn" (1816-20, English)

Shelley, "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark" (1817-20, English)

Poe, "Sonnet: to Science," "The Raven," "Anabel Lee," "Ulalume" (1829, American)

Emerson, "The Rhodora," "Days," "Hamatreya," "Brahma" (1839-57, American)

Tennyson, "Ulysses," "Break, Break, Break," from In Memoriam (Prologue, Sect. 5-8, 27-30, 54-55, 106, 130, Epilogue) (1842-50, English)

Whittier, "Ichabod," "The Eternal Goodness" (1850, American)

Criticism

Dryden, "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668, English)

Pope, :An Essay on Criticism" (1711, English)

Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," critical sections of Lives of the Poets on Cowley, Dryden, Pope (1765-81, English)

Wordsworth, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800, English)

Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria: Chapters 14 and 17 (1817, English)

Poe, "The Poetic Principle" (1848, American)

Part IV

Modern Era 1850-1960

Plays

Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (1890, Norwegian) (The Wild Duck, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People)

Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest (1895, English)

Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907, Irish)

Shaw, Man and Superman (1903, English) (Pygmalion)

O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night (1955, American) (Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh)

Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949, American)

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, American) (The Glass Menagerie)

Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952, French)

experimental theater like Edward Albee's American Dream or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Prose Fiction: Novels

Melville, Moby Dick (1851, American)

Eliot, Middlemarch (1859, English) (Adam Bede)

Dickens, Great Expectations (1860, English) (Bleak House)

At least one of the great nineteenth-century European realistic novels: Flaubert, Madame Bovery Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy, War and Peace or Anna Karenina

James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, American-English)

Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884, American)

Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891, English) (Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure)

Conrad, Lord Jim (1900, English) (Heart of Darkness)

Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1907, American) (An American Tragedy)

Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913, English) (Women in Love)

Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916, Irish)  (Ulysses, a good sampling of stories from Dubliners, especially "The Dead")

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925, American)

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929, American) (For Whom the Bell Tolls) (The Sun Also Rises)

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom (1936, American) (The Sound and the Fury)

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939, American)

Green, The Power and the Glory (1940, English)

Ellison, Invisible Man (1947, American)

other important writers are:

Warren, All the King's Men

Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

Wright, Native Son

Cary, The Horse's Mouth

Golding, Lord of the Flies

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Roth, Goodbye, Columbus

Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain

Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

Prose Fiction: Short Stories

Maupassant, "The Necklace" (c. 1885, French)

Kipling, "The Man Who Would be King" (1889, English)

Crane, "The Open Boat" (c. 1898, American) (novel: The Red Badge of Courage)

James, " The Beast of the Jungle" (1903, American)

Mann, "Death in Venice" (1912, German) ("Disorder and Early Sorrow")

Forster, "The Road from Colonus" ((1912, English)

Anderson, "Seeds" (1921, American) (The Untold Lie," "I Want to Know Why")

Mansfield, "Miss Brill" (1922, English)

Lawrence, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922, English)

Kafka, "A Hunger Artist" (1924, German) (The Metamorphosis)

Hemingway, "The Killers" (1927, American) (A Clean Well-lighted Place)

Cather, "Neighbor Rosicky" (1930, American) (novels: My Antonia, Death comes for the Archbishop)

Porter, "Flowering Judas" (1930, American) ("Noon Wine")

Wharton, "Roman Fever" (1934, American) (novel: The Age of Innocence)

Woolf, "The New Dress" (c. 1935, English) (novel: To the Lighthouse)

Welty, "A Worn Path" (1941, American) ("Why I Live at the P. O.")

Thurber, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1942, American)

Faulkner, "The Bear" long version (1945, American) ("Spotted Horses," "That Evening Sun")

O'Conner, Frank, "My Oedipus Complex" (1950, Irish)

Malamud, "The Magic Barrel" (1958, American)

O'Conner, Flannery, "Revelation" (1965, American) ("The Life You Save Might Be Your Own")

Poetry: Narrative, Dramatic, Philsophic, and Didactic

Rossetti, D. G., "The Blessed Damozel," "Sister Helen" (1850-1870, English)

Rossetti, Christina, "Goblin Market" (1862, English)

Meredith, from Modern Love: Poems 1, 16, 29, 43, 47-50 (1862, English)

Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859-79, English)

Thompson, "The Hound Of Heaven" (1893, English)

Housman, "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff" (1896, English)

Frost, "Home Burial" (1914, American)

Robinson, "The Man Against the Sky" (1916, American)

Jeffers, "Apology for Bad Dreams" (1925, American)

Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; from Four Quartets: "Burnt Norton" (1917-36, American-English) ("Little Gidding," The Waste Land)

Poetry: Lyric and Elegiac

Longfellow, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," "Divina Commedia" (six sonnets), "The Cross of Snow," "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" (1854-American)

Arnold, "Dover Beach" (1867, English)

Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine" (1866, English)

Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," sample from "Song of Myself" (1865, American)

Rossetti, D.G., Introductory Sonnet, Sonnets 19, 53, 97, from The House of Life (1848-81, English)

Dickenson, "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed," "There's a Certain Slant of Light," "After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes," "Because I Could Nonstop for Death," "Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant," "He Preached upon Breadth," "Apparently with No Surprise" (1859-82, American)

Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord," "Pied Beauty," "No Worst, There is None," "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," (c.1877, English)

Housman, Poems 2 ("Loveliest of Trees"), 13 ("When I Was One and Twenty"), 19 ("To an Athlete Dying Young"), 21 ("Bredon Hill"), 48 ("Be Still My Soul") from The Shropshire Lad (1886, English)

Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush," "Satires of Circumstance," "Hap," "The Oxen" (1900-15, English)

Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Sailing to Byantium," "Wild Swans at Cole," "The Second Coming," "Among School Children" (1893-1929, English)

Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy," "Richard Corey," "Mr. Flood's Party," "The Mill," "Karma" (1896-1921, American)

Pound, "The River-Merchant's Wife," "Ballad of the Goodly Fare," at least one of the Cantos (1909, American)

Frost, "Mending Wall," "Birches," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "After Apple Picking," "Fire and Ice," "The Pasture," "The Road Not Taken," "Acquainted with the Night" (1913-23, American)

Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Sunday Morning," (1915-1919, American)

Sandburg, "Cool Tombs," "Chicago," "I Am the People, The Mob" (1916-1918, American)

Williams, "Tract," "The Wheelbarrow" (1917-1923, American)

Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (c. 1918, English)

Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1924, American-English)

Crane, Hart, "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" (1930, American)

cummings, "buffalo bill," "portrait," "chanson innocente," ("in just-spring"), "anyone lived in a little how town" (1930-1940, American)

MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell," "Ars Poetica" (1930, American)

Spender, "The Express" (1933, English)

Moore, "Poetry" (c. 1935, American)

Thomas, "The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "Fern Hill," "A Refusal to Mourn..." (1939-1946, English)

Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "Musee des Beaux Arts" (1940, English  American)

Roethke, "Elegy for Jane," "I Knew a Woman" (1954-1958, American)

And many other modern poets–Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Richard Ederhart, Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Saxton, Hugh MacDiarmid, Thom Gunn, and Ted Hughes.

Criticism

Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864, English)

Meredith, Parts 1 to 8 of "The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit: (1877, English)

James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884, American-English)

Howells, sample Criticism and Fiction, at least from chapters XXI & XXIV (1891, American)

Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917, American-English)

Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry" (1943, American)

Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (1947, American)

Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, "Polemical Introduction," "Theory of  Myths" (1957, English)