Which 10 authors should be representative of the canon of English literature, consistent with your formative experience?
Sweet mav, your words formative experience sent my mind back to school. I'd have to say Chaucer--he was the first.
Also S.T. Coleridge, for Kubla Khan if nothing else. William Blake. Shirley Jackson--in junior high school, I had never, ever come across anything like "The Lottery"--it shook me to the core. Arthur Miller. Mary Shelley--nothing like Dr. Frankenstein had ever appeared, either, I don't think. Beatrix Potter, who showed the way to what good children's literature could be. Charles Dickens.
Robert Frost. T.H. White, for The Once and Future King:
that description of the "duel" between those two inept knights nearly got me tossed out of the library for laughing!