Splendour in the Grass by William Wordsworth

                         By ShaleyRenee.

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

English literature's 50 key moments from Marlowe to JK Rowling

Literary turning points ... Christopher Marlowe and JK Rowling. Photograph: Hulton Getty/Murdo Macleod

BBC Radio Three is currently broadcasting a fascinating series on the "50 key works" of classical music. This is a spin-off from Howard Goodall's BBC2 television series and its tie-in book, The Story of Music (Chatto), and it crystallises – for the amateur listener – the turning points in the evolution of the classical tradition in the most enthralling way. Did you, for instance, know that Procul Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale contains a harmonic line that is pure Bach?

So much for music. Following Radio 3, I've found myself speculating about the 50 key moments in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Arguably, Goodall's very good idea works almost as well for the history of the printed page.

Note: what follows is not merely a book list, but an attempt to identify some of the hinge moments in our literature – a composite of significant events, notable poems, plays, and novels, plus influential deaths, starting with the violent death of Shakespeare's one serious rival …

1. The death of Christopher Marlowe (1593)

2. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609)

3. The King James Bible (1611)

4. William Shakespeare: The First Folio (1623)

5. John Milton: Areopagitica (1644)

6. Samuel Pepys: The Diaries (1660-69)

7. John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

8. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

9. William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

10. Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

11. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1727)

12. Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

13. Thomas Jefferson: The American Declaration of Independence(1776)

14. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)

15. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography (1793)

16. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

17. William Wordsworth: "The Prelude" (1805)

18. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice (1813)

19. Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812)

20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism (1818)

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The American Scholar" (1837)

22. Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (1837)

23. The uniform Penny Post (1840)

24. Thomas Hood: "The Song of the Shirt" (1843)

25. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)

26. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1849)

27. Herman Melville: Moby Dick (1851)

28. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)

29. Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)

30. Henry Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

31. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

32. Lewis Carroll: Alice In Wonderland (1865)

33. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)

34. First commercially successful typewriter, USA. (1878)

35. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)

36. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

37. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

38. Thomas Hardy: Poems (c.1900)

39. JM Barrie: Peter Pan (1904)

40. James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

41. TS Eliot: The Waste Land (1922)

42. F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

43. George Orwell: George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
(1949)

44. Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)

45. Jack Kerouac: On The Road (1957)

46. Maurice Sendak: Where The Wild Things Are (1963)

47. Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)

48. WG Sebald: Vertigo (1990)

49. The launch of Amazon.com (1994)

50. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

Plus a bonus book - Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998)

This catalogue, in conclusion, is highly partisan and impressionistic. It makes no claim to be comprehensive (how could it?). Rather, it aims to stimulate a discussion about the turning-points in the world of books and letters from the King James Bible to the present day.

Courtesy:The Guardian