Below is the text of an email I sent out to some students over the years. I offer it here as food for thought-- esp. since even in going through it to add the necessarily typeface changes, I realize yet again that the idea of identifying a canon is not so much about institutionalizing texts, but about remember the wealth and breadth of the tradition, and how much one necessarily forgets, omits, and/or lacks. Goodness knows I could probably add a litany of other writers now, but I'll leave the message as is. Pardon any topical references which might now be irrelevant.

The Well-Tempered English Student

Some time ago, I met up with a former student in the process of applying for graduate school in English. Among other things, she wound up asking me what seemed to me "core readings" for a literature student-- i.e., what texts/authors are essential to having a well-rounded literary background. In some ways, it's an easy question, with certain writers jumping immediately to mind; in some ways, it's very difficult, as one desperately tries to disinguish between the important and the essential. After some thought, I've pieced together what I'd very loosely call a "greatest hits" collection, a list of materials that will inevitably prove useful to anyone considering studying beyond the undergraduate level in English. I've included the list below for any of you ever considering doing an MA or a PhD in English. Some of the material below is subjective, admittedly, and many graduate students have gotten by without reading from a number of the ones mentioned below, but there is much to be said for having a good grasp of the primary literary canon. Keep in mind that in grad school, it matters little if you've "never encountered **** text in a class before"; after all, even before you started university, I'm sure most of you were expected to know something of Shakespeare whether or not you'd read him, or any specific play. That's not to say you'll need to know "everything" below, but chances are you should have a familiarity with some of the material below.

Anyway, here's my list, for your use or disuse, as any of you see fit, if at all......

Ancient Texts: The ancient texts are more important than most people tend to realize. Even if they're planning on studying American, Canadian, or Post-Colonial, a good grasp of the ancients is important. Sophocles' The Theban Trilogy (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone), Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, Aristotle's Poetics, and Plato's The Republic are all essential. Also important, but less immediately so: Euripides, The Bacchae; one or two plays by Aristophanes; some of the love poems of Sappho; an ode or two from Pindar; Plato's The Symposium and Phaedo. And later: Plutarch, Longinus. From the Greeks, one moves toward the Romans: Cautullus, Terence, Juvenal, Horace, and Livy. Especially important: Virgil's The Aeneid; Ovid's The Metamorphoses (so often translated); Marcus Aurelius' Meditations; and at least part of Saint Augustine's The Confessions. The main ones here, though, are Sophocles, Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Ovid-- with anyone interested in feminist or queer theory wise to add Sappho. Also: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Sacred Texts: Religious texts have always had a profound effect on literature, and, indeed, the process of exegesis has religious roots more than literary (qua literary) roots. Augustine, mentioned above, crosses over into this category, but here I'd emphasize all the texts people tend to be uncomfortable with, for one reason or another: The Bible (for English students, primarily the King James Version); The Koran; The Bhagavad-Gita; The Torah and The Talmud. Also, some readings, randomly, will do to grasp some of the extent considerations of nationality and sociality. Many of the Eastern religions do not impress themselves on literary tradition until the 19th and 20th centuries, but it's hard to relate to people like T.S. Eliot without a grasp of the Gita or Confucious.

Pre-Renaissance English: This tends to be the biggest hole in people's reading. Beowulf is essential, and there's a lovely recent translation by Seamus Heaney that renders the translation on facing pages with the original text (though some versions are not "English" by any means). A sampling of Medieval lyrics is important, and can be found in just about any decent anthology. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, both written (assumedly) by an unknown priest, are classics, and absolutely necessary, as is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, despite my own moreorless inexplicable dissaffinity for Chaucer. And, though it's written on the cusp of the Renaissance, Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman is important, and was one of the most popular texts of its time, surviving, at last count, in as many as 47 original copies (considering how rare such printed texts were at the time).

Pre- and Early Renaissance Non-English: Dante, Dante, Dante. The Divine Comedy and The New Life are profoundly influential, and you won't get too far in studying literature until 1960 without them; hell, even Seven takes its cue from Dante. Chretien de Troyes' Yvain is important, too, but more so for those studying before 1700. Other important writers: Boccaccio, The Decameron; Vico, Principles of a New Science; Machiavelli, The Prince; the poems of St. John of the Cross; Montaigne, Essays; Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Other than Dante, though, the major figure here is Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote ought to be required reading.

Renaissance English: Yes, Shakespeare is the big name here, and the best I can suggest is to read Shakie in his entirety. I'm aware, though, that most people will not be able to do this, so I'd emphasize the following: the Sonnets, The Tempest, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and the Bolingbroke tetralogy. After that: As You Like It, Measure for Measure; Pericles; The Winter's Tale; The Merchant of Venice; Richard III; King John; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Twelfth Night. But it's also in this period that English as a language truly comes alive: Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and The Arcadia, and, arguably just outside the scope of the Renaissance, John Milton's Paradise Lost are all products of this period; and despite Milton's very awkward temporal placement, he seems to connect very nicely with Renaissance tradition, though certainly disobediently. Other key writers: John Donne (of course!); Henry Howard; Thomas Wyatt; Ben Jonson (Volpone, especially); Christopher Marlowe; John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, primarily), and on and on. If, for example, you apply to a larger university, they will most likely insist that you take a course in Renaissance non-dramatic (i.e., anything more than Shakie's plays), so it's definitely a good idea to be well-read in the Renaissance.

Restoration and 18th Century: The big names here, at least in terms of English as a language, are John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Both are accomplished poets, both important in the development of literary tastes, and both important translators, both men should be read broadly. Dryden's play All for Love and many of his satires and short lyrics (including Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe) are essential; the same is true of Pope's In Memoriam. Other key writers: Andrew Marvell, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Daniel Defoe. This is also the period of the development of the English novel: Richardson' s Clarissa and Pamela emerge here, as do Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Fielding's Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. There's also a burgeoning of female writers in this period, including Amelia Lanier and Aphra Behn, the latter the first female writer in England to make her living from writing. And let us not forget the great Scotsman, Robert Burns.

Romantics and 19th Century British: Yes, the Romantics, all the guys you've heard of: Blake, Keats, Shelley (Mary and Percy), Wordsworth, Coleridge. Not long ago, Wordsy and Coleridge were the primary figures here, but time hasn't been very kind to them, though Wordsy's The Prelude, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and many of the shorter works from their collaboration Lyrical Ballads remain essential. Recent years have taken to elevating Blake above the others, though he was once dismissed as a madman. There are almost as many articles in any given year written on (or involving) Blake as there are on Shakespeare, and a good copy of his collected works will prove invaluable. Here I refer not just to the scholastic favourites (Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), but also the more complicated poetic prophesies (Milton, Jerusalem, Europe, and Vala, or the Four Zoas). That's just the poets: this period is extremely productive for the novel, too, primarily with the big man himself, Dickens. You really ought to read at least two or three of Dickens' novels, and ideally one of the major works: Little Dorrit, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Hard Times, The Pickwick Papers. But the novel is exploding, with a lot of major writers emerging, especially women: the Bronte sisters (Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights should be required); George Eliot (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda); Jane Austen. Other writers of note, crossing genres, include the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), Oscar Wilde, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll, and the English laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Pre-20th Century American: Really, you want to own and know the collected works of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, probably the two most important American writers, even still. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn remains a necessity. And though he continues to write into the 20th century, really, every wannabe English student needs to be versed in the fiction of Henry James-- preferably more than just the short tales. Here you want to get a copy of Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, or The Golden Bowl. Also, a good collection of Edgar Allan Poe would be a good idea, as well as copies of: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; Emerson's various essays; Thoreau's Walden; Longfellow's Hiawatha. And, of course, the absolute necessity: Herman Melville's Moby Dick remains one of the classics of the genre, and anyone who goes through life without reading it will have denied him- or her- self.

Modern British and American (1900-1950): This period is aflurry in activity, rivalling it with the Renaissance as the most productive literary period. The names alone are huge: W.B. Yeats; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; William Carlos Williams; Ezra Pound; Tennessee Williams; George Bernard Shaw; E. M. Forster; Virginia Woolf; Robert Frost; Joseph Conrad; Dylan Thomas; Langston Hughes; Eudora Welty; H.D.; Thornton Wilder; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Eugene O'Neill; Evelyn Waugh; Graham Greene; D. H. Lawrence; Edith Wharton; F. Scott Fitzgerald; e.e. cummings; Samuel Beckett; Wallace Stevens; Ford Madox Ford; George Orwell; H. G. Wells; Stevie Smith; and the list could go on and on. Reading among any of the above will no doubt prove helpful, especially Yeats, Faulkner, Pound, both Williamses, Conrad, Thomas, Stevens, Lawrence, and Beckett. But two figures tower above the others in their influence: T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Eliot once seemed as if he'd never topple Yeats' stature, but he did, and he became the most influential thinker about literature, and the most influential poet, until the mid 1960s. The Waste Land, Four Quartets, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": indispensible. Read broadly, too, in his criticism. As for Joyce, his influence on the novel as we now conceive it is inescapable, and I recommend trudging through Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Kewpie dolls for any who can make sense of Finnegans Wake. I don't know of anyone who's been able to do well in grad studies without at least a cursory grasp of the writers in this period, something I can only say equally of the Renaissance.

Post-1960: Comparatively, this period is less fecund, and there are fewer writers of towering stature. Among poets, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and Philip Larkin are pretty much essential, with most others being relatively peripheral. I recommend Mark Strand, too, but he's always been a bit too far outside of what has been archetypal for the period. Among novelists, I'm less certain, but here are a few stabs: Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Graham Greene (again), Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac (mainly Dharma Bums and On The Road), Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur Miller, John Fowles, William Golding, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Kingsley Amis. Among dramatists: Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, John Osborne (mainly Look Back in Anger), Edward Albee, Arthur Miller (again). On the novelists and dramatists I'm a bit off my mark, and I admit it: this period has never been one of my primary interests.

Canadian: CanLit courses will tend to place what I think exaggerated emphasis on the tomes, LONG works like Wacousta and Roughing it in the Bush. But unless you're planning on going into Canadian studies (in which case, I'm not much use, save RE poetry), you really only need to know the writers whose influence has been more than local. Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy is crucial; a novel or two from Atwood and Ondaatje; Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (still marked by many as the first Canadian 'postmodern' novel, though I disagree); the epic poems of E. J. Pratt; some of the stories of Alice Munro; one of Mordecai Richler's novels, most likely St. Urbain's Horseman; McLennan's Two Solitudes and Barometer Rising; Margaret Laurence; b.p. nichol; Morley Callaghan. I know I'm not doing this section justice, because I'm overlooking a number of very good writers, but in terms of an international context, very few Canadian writers have been influential. Yes, I know I'm exposing myself to intense criticism, and your CanLit profs will disagree with me vehemently. Of equal point for disagreement: you really should read among the two most influential Canadian thinkers, former colleagues Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy, especially) and Northrop Frye, long seen as the great sun-god of Canadian literary criticism who necessarily had to be slaughtered for the good of Canadian academic society (can you tell I'm a defender of Frye?). For Frye: Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, and Words With Power really ought to be essential reading, but for quicker versions see The Educated Imagination and The Well-Tempered Critic.

Post-Colonial Literature In English: This is certainly my own weakest area, in part because of a lack of interest, but also because of the pure breadth of the rubric-- it winds up encompassing anything outside of England or America, and the temporal limits are usually left very vague. Canadian literature is occasionally put in this category, but so are the literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, and so forth. Further, some writers are put into this category very awkwardly, like Salman Rushdie, whose life has been spent writing around the world, but very often in England. Rushdie is a good read, though, and his Midnight's Children is one of the best books of the past 30 years. The poetry of Derek Walcott is especially beautiful, and his Nobel prize was certainly deserved. Some writers I would value more highly than my colleagues would (Ngugi wa'Thiongo's Petals of Blood, for example), and some would be labelled white voices loosely put into the PoCo rubric (Elizabeth Jolley, for example). Chinua Achebe is pretty important here, especially Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart; R. K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul are internationally lauded; A.D. Hope and Fleur Adcock are well-respected poets; Peter Carey and David Malouf are highly-regarded; and, of course, Nadime Gordimer.

Major Writers in Languages Other Than English: This area is impossible to navigate entirely, and I know full well I'll leave out some extremely important authors. Some stand out immediately: Tolstoy; Dostoevysky; Pushkin; Rilke; Neruda; Gabria Garcia Marquez; Moliere; Ionesco; Sartre; Camus; Proust; Goethe; Soyinka; Szymborska; Ibsen; Solzhenitsyn; Kafka; and on and on. But in thinking about completing this section, I realize I'd never really finish, and only end up chasing my own tail.

Some Thoughts on Making This List: This list, despite its immediate length, is -- dare I say it-- skeletal. I've omitted a number of writers who are important, and some who are just good but not commonly recognized for their importance.

Admittedly, this list has a bent towards those continuing in their studies beyond the undergraduate level, but I hope too it might be useful for those of you luckily escaping the institutional structure of the university but have an interest in continued reading.

But the dominant rule remains this: Read on.