Robert Burns (1759-1796) is largely considered Scotland's national poet, and among his most famous compositions is the lyrics to the popular New Year's tune "Auld Lang Syne." Burns both compiled and edited a number of Scottish folk songs, and wrote his own lyrics to traditional tunes. Burns' birthday, January 25, is celebrated as a holiday in Scotland and around the world by the Scottish diaspora.

The poet John Donne was an Anglican clergyman, and wrote many poems which reflect a deep and pious religious faith. Donne, however, also excelled at writing sonnets that fit in with a traditional sonnet form, including extremely sensual love poems filled with erotic imagery.

Candide was written by Voltaire, a French Enlightenment author, in 1759 and systematically details a series of ills of European society. It targets religion and challenges the authority of the monarchy.

The authorship of The Illiad and The Odyssey is traditionally attributed to Homer.

Gilgamesh was likely a real king of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, probably sometime around 2500 BCE. He is most well known, however, as the main character of the lengthy poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written between 1300 and 1000 BCE. The poem tells the story of his rivalry and then friendship with the wild man Enkidu and his subsequent survival of the great deluge.

The Mahabharata is one of the epic Sanskrit texts of India, which details an epic struggle between two related families, the Kauravas and Pandavas. Included in the Mahabharata are smaller pieces which have been foundational in the development of Hinduism, such as the Bhagavad Gita.

Catullus was a Roman poet most well known for his very short poems, typically on the love for a mysterious woman he refers to as "Lesbia." There is another element to Catullus' poetry, however, which includes biting comments about various politicians and notable Romans. Included among these figures is Julius Caesar, before he became the first Dictator of Rome.

The Homeric epics, a collective name for the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, are long verse retellings of the Trojan War. The epics were written around the eighth or ninth Centuries BCE, but the Trojan War, if it took place, happened some four hundred or five hundred years before the poems were first composed. Both epics tell of great heroes and the intervention of divine presences.

Of course, the very name "Song of Songs" already tempts you to answer that this is a piece of poetry, even if you are not aware of its genre and content. The poem is actually a piece of erotic love poetry, detailing the back and forth of the desires of a bride and groom for each other's beauty and love. The poem was ultimately brought into the overall canon of the Hebrew Scriptures because of its allegorical interpretation for the relation between the Hebrew people and God. For many Christian mystics, this book played a massively important role for describing the relationship between the individual soul and God as well. For example, the great monastic, Cistercian writer Bernard of Clairvaux produced numerous sermons on the Song, not even making it through all of the text in spite of writing over eighty sermons. 

The Song is also known as the "Song of Solomon" or the "Canticle of Canticles."

The Canterbury Tales was a landmark work in English literature as one of the earliest works written in vernacular English, which in the late fourteenth century was Middle English. The Canterbury Tales' author, Geoffrey Chaucer, was most likely inspired by the works of Bocaccio and Dante, which he would have encountered in diplomatic trips to Italy. The Canterbury Tales consist of over twenty unrelated tales, loosely bound together by the fact that they are all told by pilgrims on a trip to Canterbury cathedral.