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The author of the poem "Sylvia's Death" is __________.
Anne Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" deals with the death of fellow poet Sylvia Plath.
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The author of the poem "We Real Cool" is __________.
The poem is by Gwendolyn Brooks, who was the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks experimented with poetic form throughout her career, but her poetry is often concerned with the urban poor of the area of Chicago in which she lived for much of her life. This poem is a favorite of the Lit GRE's and it is extremely short, so you should make it a point to be able to recognize it on first sight.
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Which American poet was known for a playful use of language, a lack of standard orthography, a latent transcendentalism, and titles such as “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in” and “anyone lived in a pretty how town”?
The poet described is Edward Estlin Cummings, usually known as e. e. cummings. In addition to his poetry, Cummings was known for his paintings, plays, novels and essays.
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This American poet was heralded as the leader of the Beats and had his epic poem “Howl” subjected to an obscenity trial in the 1950s.
The poet in question is Allen Ginsberg, a leading figure in the counterculture movement. His most famous work, “Howl,” gave voice to previously unheard minorities and spoke against war, materialism, consumerism, homophobia, and various forms of repression. Its opening lines are frequently quoted, although “Howl” was often censored because of its depictions of homosexual and heterosexual sex acts.
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This poet was known for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar as well as her collection of poetry, Ariel. Some of her best-known poems include “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Who is she?
The poet is Sylvia Plath, wife of the British poet Ted Hughes and an important figure in the genre of confessional poetry. Plath’s work is marked by body- and nature-based imagery, depictions of mental illness, and seemingly mundane details from everyday life.
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“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a famous poem by which author?
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.”
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This expatriate American wrote poems distinguished by their repetition, attention to sound, and ostensible incomprehensibility. This poet's writing, which includes books such as Tender Buttons and The Making of Americans, often received critical acclaim but not popular attention. Who is the poet?
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.
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This modernist, imagist poet wrote works including “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Spring and All.”
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.
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Which poet was the author of “We Real Cool” and was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize?
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.
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A leader of the Harlem Renaissance, this poet wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred.”
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.
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Which modernist poet wrote “Baseball and Writing,” “He Made This Screen,” and “Poetry”?
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").
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Who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?
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.
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Which poet is the author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and The Tennis Court Oath, two characteristically opaque and controversial poetry collections?
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.
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Who is the author of the postmodernist poetry collection The Dream Songs?
John Berryman, a leading confessional and postmodern poet, is best known for the collection The Dream Songs, a compilation of his two books 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The work, which won the Pulitzer Prize, features a semi-autobiographical and identity-shifting character named Henry as well as a sometimes controversial appropriation of black language.
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Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
This author of this poem also wrote __________.
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)
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And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
Identify the title of poem from which the selection was adapted based on its content and style.
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)
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Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
This stanza opens a famous poem by which American author?
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.
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I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil,
this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and
their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Who wrote this poem?
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.
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In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow near I did not look,
I wakened was with thund’ring noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.
That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”
Let no man know is my Desire.
I, starting up, the light did spy,
And to my God my heart did cry
To straighten me in my Distress
And not to leave me succourless.
Who wrote the poem from which this passage is adapted?
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)
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The Song of Hiawatha
"On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood Nokomis, the old woman,
Pointing with her finger westward,
O'er the water pointing westward,
To the purple clouds of sunset."
Who wrote the poem from which these lines are taken?
“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.
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