Once I'm /donewiththegreeks/, how do I into the western canon?

My goal is to familiarize myself with the essential works of the canon. I understand that the rabbit hole never really ends but at the moment I'm really just trying to understand the larger cultural context for works like divine comedy and paradise lost.

At the moment my list goes something like this
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Bible, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Milton, Pope, Blake, Poe, Melville, Joyce.

I don't know who else I should add

Plutarch and Livy
Thucydides
Pilgrim's Progress
Voltaire
Locke and Hobbes
Gilgamesh
Cervantes

Marlowe.

I have 30 books of Cicero. On some level, I can't stand that.

I'll take a crack at simplifying it as much as I can:

Ancient Greece:
>Homer
>Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy
>Euripides' Bacchae, Medea, Iphigenia at Aulis
>Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the Clouds
>Herodotus and Thucydides (somewhat optional, but important for a cultural context)
>Plato's Five Dialogues, Symposium, Republic
>Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
supplement w/ bulfinch's mythology

Romans:
>Ovid's Metamorphoses
>Virgil's Aeneid
>Livy's Early History of Rome
>Cicero's On the Republic
petronius and apuleius are good for a few laughs, but as one user said, try not to get bogged down in rome.

Christianity (inc. fanfic):
>Augustine's City of God, Confessions
>KJV Bible + Apocrypha
>Milton's Paradise Lost
>Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
>Dante's Divine Comedy

Anglo:
>Beowulf (i like Heaneywulf, desu)
>Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (read it aloud for maximum effect)
>Shakespeare (briefly, Henry IV, King Lear, Hamlet, the Tempest, Twelfth Night)
>Hobbes' Leviathan
>Sterne's Tristram Shandy
>Wordsworth/Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads

America:
>Melville's Moby-Dick
>Thoreau's On Walden Pond
>Whitman's Leaves of Grass
>Eliot's The Waste Land
>Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (for a taste)

my eyes are starting to cross; i've left out obvious things like "Don Quixote" and the whole of german and russian lit because of fatigue. this list is not a ringing endorsement of all of the works, but i can guarantee you (with someone taking up the slack for the french, italians, germans and russians i've neglected) that if you read the above, you will be plugged into the bedrock of literary history and be able to converse fluently on 90% of these topics.

Virgil
King James Bible
Dante
Shakespeare
Cervantes
Milton

Thank you user, I appreciate it

De Rerum Natura
Why do you anglostards always forget De Rerum Natura

why the leviathan?

it's one of the first (if not the first) modern defenses of social contract theory, which is a hugely influential concept in western thought. also, its apologia for monarchy is critical in understanding the backdrop of european history at that time, especially when considering the revolutions that followed soon after.

i did, however, hesitate to put it in.

>yeezus

So if I follow this list will I have gotten the gist of the Western Canon?

Well you really should read some contemporary commentary on the Greeks, then dive into some modern and post-modern philosophy (just so you can realize why one must start with the greeks). After this you just read Kant while telling yourself that it's is clear and makes perfect sense (and my understanding is due to the fact that I actually read the greeks first)

people push the KJV bible hard but really, don't bother unless you're prepared to learn a english dialect by consistently referencing a clarifying text. NSRV and the NSRV Catholic Edition are what you want. paradise lost is at least way shorter and it's poetry & in original language so it's worth the effort.

also by the way, the reality is that you'll probably never end up conversing on any of this unless you have a degree in philosophy/english so prioritize reading what you want. linearity isn't fundamental.

that's a pretty difficult thing to say. i neglected obvious things like tolstoyevsky and cervantes (not to mention goethe, mann, and joyce), but it's a solid foundation nonetheless.

opie is trying to get into western literature and the KJV is *the* watershed of english lit. not to mention, if i'm recommending hobbes, i can't not recommend the KJV—it's directly responsible for so many democratic revolutions and other social movements (e.g. abolitionism).

>>KJV Bible + Apocrypha
>>Milton's Paradise Lost
>>Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
what ?
dude you take a millenium gap (except for Dante) wtf
at least put Aquinas,the Imitation and John of the Cross on here

i did consider putting "dark night of the soul" and "imitation" on (i'm a thomist, but aquinas is not in most people's wheelhouses; especially if you consider that this is supposed to be a broad-ranging survey). honestly, unless you're a practicing christian, those two works would be bloat.

hell, i didn't put kierkegaard on even though he's one of my favorites—why? because he's not essential to understanding 90% of discourse in literature.