By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The seventeenth century gave us the first published poems from America, the elaborate conceits and scientific flavour of metaphysical poetry, some classic English epic poems, and the birth of the new, orderly, ‘neoclassical’ poetry that would continue into the following century. Below, we select ten of the most emblematic – and greatest – seventeenth-century poems, and offer a brief introduction to each.