Which texts would you select if you had to cover English poetry from Beowulf to Blake in eight teaching hours?

Your major
tradeoff in this kind of survey will be depth vs. breadth. I usually try to create a selection
that covers examples of as many genres as possible, to give a sense of the general types of
writing in the period and their historical evolution. One sequence might
be:

Beowulf: discuss oral-traditional composition and the nature of epic,
strong stress prosody, Old English

Chaucer: Wife of Bath, Pardoner, or--
Norman conquest, development of iambic pentameter, Middle English, Christianity, class
system

Elizabethan/Jacobean:
Shakespeare -- 1...

href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry