 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the dialing buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Shall I compare thee? Poetry Education Seduction is the title of my inaugural lecture, when I'm going to be talking about these three themes in relation to Elizabethan poetry. I'll start by asking, how were people like Shakespeare and Spencer educated? What did they learn at school? What were their models of literature? How are they different from our models? And from this, what is the purpose of literature? What does it teach us? At the end of the lecture, I'll look at how Shakespeare and Spencer use comparisons and how those comparisons relate to the big theme of what literature teaches us.