Welcome to Litsy!

Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume XLI is the second of three volumes that ambitiously survey half a milliennium of poetry in the English language. More than 300 works by 60 authors in this volume alone span the 18th and 19th centuries, and include: [ George Sewell: "The Dying Man in His Garden" [ Alison Rutherford Cockburn: "The Flowers of the Forest" [ Henry Fielding: "A Hunting Song" [ Oliver Goldsmith: "The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society" [ Richard Brinsley Sheridan: "Drinking Song" [ Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne: "The Auld House" [ William Blake: "The Tiger" [ William Wordsworth: "Nature and the Poet" [ Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [ Sir Walter Scott: "To a Lock of Hair" [ Thomas Campbell: "The Soldier's Dream" [ George Gordon, Lord Byron: "She Walks in Beauty" [ Percy Bysshe Shelley: "To a Skylark" [ John Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" [ Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Sonnets" [ and much more.