1. Edmund Spenser
The noblest name in Allegory’s page,
Sixteenth century poet Edmund Spenser is most famous for The Faerie Queene, a fantastical epic poem about knights facing tests of virtue that serves as an allegory for the English House of Tudor and Queen Elizabeth I.
2. Homer
The hand that traced inexorable rage;
The first line of Homer’s Iliad reads: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,”
3. Aristotle
A pleasing moralist whose page refined,
Displays the deepest knowledge of the mind;
Aristotle is the first writer to receive two lines in Poe’s poem. In Aristotelian ethics, to achieve lifelong happiness one must have aretē, meaning “moral virtue.” Of course, Aristotle’s works extend well beyond his study of philosophical ethics, establishing foundations for many fields of study including science, poetry, and politics.
4. Kallimakhos (Callimachus)
A tender poet of a foreign tongue,
(Indited in the language that he sung.)
Callimachus was an ancient greek poet and scholar at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. In his poem, Poe seems to be referring to the fact that Callimachus, who wrote in Greek, had a significant influence on Latin works written by ancient Roman poets like Ovid and Sextus Propertius. Callimachus is best known for his elegies.
5. Percy Bysshe Shelley
A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page
At once the shame and glory of our age,
Shelley died when Poe was only 13, but the Baltimore writer became deeply interested in Shelley’s works of Romantic poetry. Poe praised Shelley, who never received recognition as a great poet during his lifetime, in a review of The Drama of Exile and Other Poems, and he named Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant a poem of “purest ideality.” Shelley, whose second wife Mary wrote Frankenstein, is best remembered today for his poem Ozymandias.
6. Alexander Pope
The prince of harmony and stirling sense,
Pope, best known for his 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock, was a master of satire and mock-epic poetry. Poe celebrates Pope’s “harmony,” possibly a reference to his frequent use of heroic couplets, and his “stirling sense,” likely a nod to Pope’s satirical criticisms of 18th century English society.
7. Euripides
The ancient dramatist of eminence,
Euripides is not as well remembered today as his contemporary Greek tragedian Sophocles, but in 5th century BC Athens, Euripides was more famous and widely read. In the Hellenistic period, Euripides was studied alongside Homer as a cornerstone of Greek literature. More plays written by Euripides survive today than from any other ancient Greek tragedian.
8. Mark Akenside
The bard that paints imagination’s powers,
Eighteenth-century poet and physician Mark Akenside wrote an ambitious poem called The Pleasures of the Imagination, first published in 1744. The work, which attempts to describe imagination as a distinct function separate from philosophy, was praised for is beautiful language, but criticized for being too obscure in its descriptions of an abstract concept.
9. Samuel Rogers
And him whose song revives departed hours,
Born 46 years before Poe and outliving him by six years, Samuel Rogers was a famed English Romantic poet who has since been eclipsed by his friends William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Lord Byron. Rogers wrote a poem inspired by Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination called The Pleasures of Memory, first published in 1792. The poem is known for freely bouncing from one image to the next.
10. Euripides
Once more an ancient tragic bard recall,
In boldness of design surpassing all.
Poe includes Euripides for a second time, praising his role in the formation of tragic drama.
11. William Shakespeare (Shakspeare)
These names when rightly read, a name [make] known
Which gathers all their glories in its own.
The names of the 10 previous poets spell out Shakspeare, a common spelling for Shakespeare at the time: Spenser, Homer, Aristotle, Kallimachos, Shelley, Pope, Euripides, Akenside, Rogers, Euripides.
