The proposals for the revised National Curriculum in English suggest limiting the pre-twentieth century poetry that GCSE pupils read to “representative Romantic poetry” (Department for Education [DFE], 2013, p. 4). This paper argues that poetry of the early modern period is challenging and enriching study for adolescent pupils and that narrowing the definition of pre-twentieth century poetry will limit the potential richness of the curriculum for teenage readers. The evidence is drawn from a pilot study exploring the ways in which GCSE pupils made meaning out of the poetry of the early modern period and how teachers supported their pupils' meaning making. This paper reports on aspects that emerged from the data using Steiner's (1978) notion of difficulty and Fleming's (1996) discussions of how to approach poetry from a different time period. Pike's (2000; 2003) work on teaching poetry from the canon and ways of motivating pupils is referenced as well as Marcus (1992) and Conroy and Clarke (2011) on the particularities of teaching literature from the early modern period. The work also draws on the work of Rosenblatt (1970), Iser (1978) and Gordon (2009), to explore the ways in which the classroom provided a space for the “Lifeworlds” of the pupils, the teacher and the poet come together.