The romantic period (1785-1830): Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) ; Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) ; William Blake (1757-1827) ; Robert Burns (1759-1796) ; Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ; William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ; George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ; Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) ; John Clare (1793-1864) ; Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) ; John Keats (1795-1821) -- The Victorian age (1830-1901): Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) ; Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) ; Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) ; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) ; Robert Browning (1812-1889) ; Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) ; Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) ; Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) ; Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ; Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) ; Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). -- The twentieth century and after: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) ; Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) ; William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) ; Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) ; James Joyce (1882-1941) ; D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) ; T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) ; Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) ; Jean Rhys (1890-1979) -- Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) -- W.H. Auden (1907-1973) ; Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) ; Philip Larkin (1922-1985) ; Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) ; Brian Friel (b. 1929) ; Derek Walcott (b. 1930) ; Alice Munro (b. 1931) ; Seamus Heaney (b. 1939) ; J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940) ; Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) ; Anne Carson (b. 1950).