A time of political and social unrest in England, this period produced some of the greatest poetry in English. This volume includes the major poets--John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell--the major women writers of the era--Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips--and nineteen other poets essential to an understanding of English literature in the seventeenth century. The poems are accompanied by headnotes and explanatory annotations. "Criticism" is divided into two sections. The first, "Seventeenth- and...