Putting Works in Order

The idea

Some questions ask you to put works or authors in chronological order. First, place each in its period: Beowulf in Old English, Chaucer in Middle English, Shakespeare and Spenser in the sixteenth century, Donne and Milton in the seventeenth, Pope and Johnson in the eighteenth, Wordsworth and Keats in the Romantic period, Tennyson and Dickens in the Victorian, Joyce and Eliot in the twentieth. Second, use landmark dates within a period: Lyrical Ballads in seventeen ninety-eight, Paradise Lost in sixteen sixty-seven, The Waste Land in nineteen twenty-two. Third, order the periods, then the works inside each. Check one pair at a time, since one misplaced work spoils an ordering.