Identification of Poetry - AP English Literature and Composition

Anne Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" deals with the death of fellow poet Sylvia Plath.

The poem, broken into 13 fractured, imagistic sections, was written by American poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens was a leading figure in the American modernist poetry world, and in 1955 he won a Pulitzer for his work. Stevens’ work is marked by a preoccupation with intellectual themes and ideas about human consciousness. Some of his best-known poems include “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and “Sunday Morning,” as well as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Gertrude Stein is famous for her hosting of salons in Paris, where she lived with her partner Alice B. Toklas until her death in the 1940s. These salons helped support the careers of painters as renowned as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Stein herself collected many valuable pieces of artwork. Her poetry attempts to destroy the linear, logical narratives that were the dominant form of writing at the time and create a modern, fragmentary, and sometimes incomprehensible verse.

William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor as well as a poet, was known for experimental works such as “To Elsie” and the poems mentioned in the question stem. Although his vision for modern poetry differed greatly from the views of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and other literary giants, Williams found like-minded creators in “The Others,” a group of early twentieth-century New York artists and writers.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry, which also includes titles such as “The Bean Eaters,” “Sadie and Maud,” “The Crazy Woman,” and “Speech to the Young,” drew on her experiences living in inner-city Chicago and was diverse in style, incorporating everything from sonnets to blues to free verse. Brooks, an important figure in twentieth-century African-American literature, served as the Poet Laureate of Illinois for many years.

Langston Hughes wore many hats, including poet, novelist, playwright, and social justice advocate. He was an early innovator of the genre known as “jazz poetry,” which incorporates blues- and jazz-inspired rhythms and a sense of linguistic improvisation.

Marianne Moore, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is noted for her innovations and irony in her poems. She often eschewed formal meter and used animal motifs and interesting language to develop her themes, and she was known for criticizing the institution of poetry (as in her poem "Poetry").

Maya Angelou, a famous African-American poet and prose writer, is best known for her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and for her inspirational poetry. She published more than a dozen major works during her lifetime.

This contemporary postmodernist poet is John Ashbery. During his lifetime, Ashbery has produced more than a dozen volumes of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is known for its wordplay, surrealism, avant-garde syntax, and ability to resist critical analysis.

A major modernist poet, T. S. Eliot was also a highly influential critic and essayist. In his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent," Eliot rejected the inspired individualism of romantic poets like William Wordsworth in favor of a view of the poet as one who uses tradition to lift him beyond his personal experience.

Passage adapted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Elliot, 1-11 (1915)

The stanza is from T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which was published in 1915.

Passage adapted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l.99-110 (1915)

The poem is Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” a lyrical poem in which Dickinson personifies Death as he takes the speaker to her grave.

This is the opening of Walt Whitman’s beautiful “Song of Myself,” taken from Leaves of Grass (1855). The poem is said to represent the heart of Whitman’s poetic vision and be inspired by the Transcendentalist movement, although it was initially criticized for its raw, uncensored depictions of human sexuality.

Anne Bradstreet wrote “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666,” as well as many other early poems. Bradstreet, the first female author to be published in America, lived in the seventeenth century and is known for including her Puritan ideals in her poetry.

Passage adapted from "Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666" (1666)

“The Song of Hiawatha” is one of Longfellow’s best known poems. Published in 1855 and written in trochaic tetrameter, it is an epic that follows the life and adventures of Hiawatha, a Native-American hero.

This excerpt, taken from a eulogy to an American general, was written by the female poet, Phillis Wheatley. An African slave, Wheatley was well educated and wrote on a variety of topics—everything from slavery to infant mortality. She favored couplets in her work and was the first African-American to publish a book.

This poem was written by Stephen Crane. It was published in 1895, as part of his poetry collection The Black Riders and Other Lines. Historically, Crane’s poetry has received less attention than his prose, among which is the famous American novel The Red Badge of Courage, but this particular poem is often discussed among scholars and has served as the epigraph to several later works of fiction.

Written by Walt Whitman in 1865 (and popularized by the movie, Dead Poets Society), this iconic American elegy eulogizes Abraham Lincoln, compaings him to a stalwart ship captain. “O Captain! My Captain!” is included in later editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and often accompanies another Whitman elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

“Thanatopsis” was published in 1817 by the early American poet, William Cullen Bryant. As its Greek title indicates, the poem is an extended meditation on death (Thantos = "death" in Greek).