English: Poets & Poetry Flashcards by Jeff Piechocki (2024)

,Nationality, Time Period, Era, Major Works (3), Minor Works (5)

Walt Whitman

• Country: American (New York)
• Time Period: 1820 - 1890
• Era: Victorian Era and Civil War
• Major Works:
  
  • O Captain! My Captain:
  • Song of Myself
  • Leaves of Grass (Collection)
• Minor Works:
  
  • I Hear America Singing
  • A Noiseless Patient Spider”
  • Beat! Beat! Drums!
  • Sparkles from the Wheel
  • “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Identify the poet:

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (1867):

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

What a good one. Essentially, “I think this scientist is boring, I’m getting bored listening to him talk about astronomy, so I went outside to look at the stars myself.”

Identify the poet:

Sparkles from the Wheel (1871)

WHERE the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,
Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with
them.

By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,
Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,
With measur’d tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but
firm hand,
Forth issue then in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel. […]

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

(This is the knife-grinder’s poem. Whitman is watching knives sharpened)

Identify the poet and era:

I Hear America Singing (1860)

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, […]

Read the full poem: here

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

This, like many Whitman poems, was written in the lead-up to the American Civil war, which started the following year.

Identify the poet:

Song of Myself (1855)

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. […]

(Know the bolded passage.)

Read the full poem: here

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

Walt Whitman, American Victorian Poet

Read all of Leaves of Grass: here

Identify the poet:

Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861)

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow. […]

Read the full poem: here

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

(The poem directly addresses the instruments of a military band, telling drums and bugle horns to raise the alarm of war immediately after the first Civil War battle.)

Identify the poet:

A Noiseless Patient Spider (1868):

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman, American Victorian-era Poet

This poem is about connecting with the world as a spider spins its web.

Identify the poet, era, and the subject of the poem.

O Captain! My Captain! (1865)

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Know the bolded passage.

Read the full poem: here

• Walt Whitman, Victorian-era Poet
• The poem memorializes Abraham Lincoln

This was written the year Lincoln was assassinated and Civil War ended.

Country, TIme Period and Era, Three Major Works, Three Minor Works

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1800 - 1890 (Victorian Era)
• Known Best For: Idylls of the King (a collection of twelve poems about King Arthur); Charge of the Light Brigade (a poem about the Crimean War); and Ulysses, (a poem about an elderly Odysseus’ decision to abandon his throne and search for adventure.)
• Lesser Known Works: In Memoriam is an elegy dedicated to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam; Crossing the Bar; The Princess

FREQUENT: Idylls of the King; Charge of the Light Brigade; Ulysses

RARE: In Memoriam, Crossing the Bar, The Princess

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, British Victorian-Era Poet

Victorian-era Poet (1800s)

Idylls of the King (1859), a collection of twelve poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is about this fabled European king.

Identify:

This British poet served as Poet Laureate during much of the Victorian Age. He was greatly affected by the death of his good friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, and often wrote poems about the legend of King Arthur. His works include Idylls of the King.

(A “Who Am I?” question)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, British Victorian-Era Poet

Identify the poem, poet, and the war referenced here:

“Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.”

“Not though the soldier knew / Someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered;

(All three of these sections have been asked about.)

Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson (British Victorian-Era Poet)

The poem references the Crimean War.

Identify the poet, name of the poem, and the character speaking:

• “I cannot rest from my travel; I will drink life to the lees.”
• “This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle … “

Ulysses (the Roman name for the Greek Odysseus) is speaking in Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, British Victorian-Era Poet

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, British Victorian-Era Poet

Maya Angelou

• Nationality: American, (St. Louis, Missouri)
• Time Period: 1930 - 2015
• Best Known Works: The 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the poems And Still I Rise and Harlem Hopscotch.

Identify the poet:

• Her diverse career includes being the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
• In 1954, she turned to acting before she started writing while also working as northern coordinator and fund raiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
• In the 1960s, she began to focus on her writing, and in 1970 her first autobiographical work became a best seller and was nominated for a National Book Award.

Maya Angelou, American Poet

Identify the poet and poem:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Still I Rise (1978) by Maya Angelou

Identify the poet and poem:

One foot down, then hop! It’s hot.
Good things for the ones that’s got.
Another jump, now to the left.
Everybody for hisself.

In the air, now both feet down.
Since you black, don’t stick around.
Food is gone, the rent is due,
Curse and cry and then jump two.

All the people out of work,
Hold for three, then twist and jerk.
Cross the line, they count you out.
That’s what hopping’s all about.

Both feet flat, the game is done.
They think I lost. I think I won.

Harlem Hopscotch (1969) by Maya Angelou

Identify the author of the two quotes below:

“How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!” and
“Try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.”

American Poet, Maya Angelou

Nationaity, Time Period, Themes:

Emily Dickinson

• Nationality: American, Amherst Massachussetts
• Time Period: 1830 - 1890ish
• Known For: Poetry about death and nature, writing untitled poems with unusual punctuation and capitalization, the poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”

(And a few others, notably: “I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died”; “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”; and “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.”)

List of Works (11 Total):

Emily Dickinson

• I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died
• Because I Could Not Stop for Death
• Hope is the Thing with Feathers
• A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
• I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
• I Never Saw a Moor
• There’s Been a Death in the Opposite House
• I Felt a Funeral in My Brain
• The Last Night that She Lived
• Much Madness is Divinest Sense
• I’m Nobody - Are You?

Identify the poet:

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -

(This is the full text of the poem.)

American Poet, Emily Dickinson

Identify the poet and how Death is personified:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Read the full poem: here

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1863)

Death is personified here as a gentleman.

(Dickinson’s poetry tended to be untitled, they contained abrupt lines, used slant rhymes, strange capitalization, and… - punctuation -.)

Identify the poet:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

(This is the entire poem.)

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1861)

(Dickinson’s poetry tended to be untitled, they contained abrupt lines, used slant rhymes, strange capitalization, and… - punctuation -.)

Identify the poet and subject of this poem:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is -

The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on -

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone -

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1865)

This poem is about a snake.

Identify the poet:

I never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea,
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a billow be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven.
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the checks were given.

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1865)

Identify the poet:

There’s been a death in the opposite house
As lately as today.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have alway.

The neighbours rustle in and out,
The doctor drives away.
A window opens like a pod,
Abrupt, mechanically;

Somebody flings a mattress out, -
The children hurry by;
They wonder if It died on that, -
I used to when a boy.

Read the full poem: here

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1863)

Identify the poet:

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Read the full poem: here

American Poet, Emily Dickinson
(1861)

Identify the Poet:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

(This is the entire poem)

Emily Dickinson, American Poet
(1861)

identify the poet:

This poet fell in love with a Presbyterian minister. During the last several years of their life, they dressed all in white and refused to leave their home. They wrote many poems, most of which were published after their death.

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Nationality, Time Period, Movement, Known For, Poems (5):

Langston Hughes

• Nationality: American
• Time Period: 1900 - 1970
• Movement: Harlem Renaissance
• Known For: Being a leader in the Harlem Renaissance movement and developing jazz poetry; writing the poems Mother to Son, The Weary Blues, Cross, Harlem (that’s the one about a “dream deferred”), The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Cross, Harlem, The Weary Blues, Mother to Son, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Identify the Poet:

Weary Blues (1925):
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!

Read the full poem: here

Langston Hughes, American Harlem Renaissance Poet

Identify the poet:

Cross (1926):
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.

If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.

My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?

Langston Hughes, American Harlem Renaissance Poet

(Turns out, Hughes died in a small, historic hospital in New York.)

(But his ashes are under the lobby of the New York Public Library.)

Identify the poet:

Harlem (1951):
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it sags, like a heavy load
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes, American Harlem Renaissance Poet

Identify the poet:

Mother to Son (1922):
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.

Read the full poem: here

Langston Hughes, American Harlem Renaissance Poet

Identify the Poet:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921):
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Read the full poem: here

Langston Hughes, American Harlem Renaissance Poet

Nationality, TIme Period, Known For, Major Works (3), Minor Works (6):

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Nationality: American, born in Portland, Massachussetts (now Maine)
• Time Period: 1810 - 1880
• Known For: Being a Fireside Poet - one of a group of five popular poets in second half of the 1800s. Families would read their poems around the fireplace.
• Major Works: Evangeline, Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere’s Ride.
• Less Frequent Works:
• A Psalm of Life
• The Arrow and The Song
• The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
• The Cross of Snow
• The Village Blacksmith
• The Courtship of Miles Standish

Identify the poet and the war referenced:

Paul Revere’s Ride:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

(Know the first lines bolded.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

The poem is about the American Revolution.

The Fireside Poets are America’s cozy poets - they were so popular that families would read their poems around the fire.

Identify the poet:

A Psalm of Life:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
[…….]
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

(This is my favorite poem - I had to recite it in my high school English class. Read the full poem: here)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

The Fireside Poets are America’s cozy poets - they were so popular that families would read their poems around the fire.

The Arrow and the Song:
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

The Fireside Poets are America’s cozy poets - they were so popular that families would read their poems around the fire.

Identify the poet, poem, and location with which the statue is related:

Statue of Evangeline

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

Identify the poet:

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls:
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

(This is the entire poem.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

Identify the poet:

The Village Blacksmith:
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The Smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can
And looks the whole world in the face
For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

Read the full poem: here

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

Identify the poet, poem, and setting:

“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

The poem features two lovers seperated in Arcadia (in present-day Canada)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet

Identify the poet and the subject of the poem:

The Cross of Snow:
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Fireside Poet
• The poem refers to the death of Longfellow’s wife, Fanny

Identify this poet:

This person was the first American poet to have his statue placed in the famed Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abby. During his lifetime, he was one of America’s most celebrated authors. He gained his fame by writing such poems as “Evangeline,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “Hiawatha.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nationality, Time Period, Movement, Major Works (3), Lesser Works (2):

John Keats

• Nationality: British
• Time Period: 1795 - 1820 (died of tuberculosis at 25 years old.)
• Movement: Romantic Era
• Known For: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be
• Lesser Known: Endymion, Looking in to Chapman’s Homer, Ode on Melancholy

John Keats, British Romantic Poet

Identify the poet, know the first and last lines:

When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be (1818):
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

(That’s the entire poem.)

John Keats, British Romantic Poet

(He ‘ceased to be’ due to tuberculosis three years later.)

Identify the poet, poem, and movement:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
[…]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Read the full poem: here

Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) by John Keats, British Romantic Poet

Identify the poet and movement:

Ode to a Nightingale:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Read the full poem: here

John Keats, British Romantic Poet

Identify the poet and movement:

Endymion:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

(Know any bolded lines.)

Read the full poem: here

John Keats, British Romantic Poet

Identify the poet of this lesser-known work:

On First Looking in to Chapman’s Homer:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(This is the entire poem.)

John Keats, British Romantic Poet

Nationality, Time Period, Known For, Poems (8)

Robert Frost

• Nationality: American (from San Francisco)
• Time Period: 1870 - 1960
• Known For: his depictions of rural New England life, his grasp of colloquial speech, and his poetry about ordinary people in everyday situations

Works: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, Fire and Ice, Birches, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, After Apple Picking

Identify the poet:

The Death of the Hired Man (1914)

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’

This is a long one. Almost like a short story. Read more: here.

Robert Frost, American Poet

(This story is about Warren and Mary, a farmer and his wife that welcome an elderly farmhand, Silas, back to the farm to die.)

Identify the poet by the two bolded passages:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening: (1922)
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the poet by the bolded opening and ending lines:

The Road Not Taken: (1916)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the poet:

Birches:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Read the full poem: here

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the poet:

Fire & Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

(This is the entire poem.)

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the Poet:

After Apple Picking (1914):

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. […]

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the poet:

Nothing Gold Can Stay:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost, American Poet

Identify the poet:

Mending Wall:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
[…]
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Read the full poem: here

Robert Frost, American Poet

Robert Frost, American Poet

• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• William Cullen Bryant
• John Greenleaf Whittier
• James Russell Lowell (not mentioned in any questions)

American, 19th Cen. Poets with three names? Probably Fireside.

Country, Time Period, Movement, Known For (2 Poems and a Quote)

Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Country: American (from Boston)
• Time Period: 1810 - 1890
• Movement: Fireside Poet
• Known For: Old Ironsides, The Chambered Nautilus; the quote, “The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

(Fun Fact: His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is one of the most cited U.S. Supreme Court justices in American history known for his “pithy” opinions.)

Identify the poet

Old Ironsides (1830)

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Read the full poem: here

Oliver Wendell Holmes, American Fireside Poet

(Wendell wrote this after learning the famous ship USS Constitution from the War of 1812 would be decomissioned.)

Identify the poet

The Chambered Nautilus (1858):

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! […]

Read the full poem: here

Oliver Wendell Holmes, American Fireside Poet

Nationality, Time Period, Known For:

Edgar Allen Poe

• Nationality:
• Time Period:
  have been called the “father of the detective story,” although I am most famous for my tales of horror including “The Pit and The Pendulum
  Edgar Allan Poe gained the title of “Father of the American Detective Story” when he introduced his detective C. Auguste Dupin in the short story Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841.

Nationality, Time Period, Known For:

Edgar Allen Poe

• The Cask of Amontillado
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Raven
• The Black Cat
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Masque of the Red Death
• Murders in the Rue Morgue
• Annabel Lee

• The ravens can say “Nevermore”
• is name of the lost love to whom Edgar Allan Poe refers in the following line from “The Raven”: “For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name [blank] – Nameless here for evermore.

William Blake

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1760 - 1830
• Movement: Romanticism
• Known For: Two collections of poetry in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”; the poems “The Tyger” and “The Lamb”

Paintings: Ancient of Days; Nebuchadnezzar

Poems: The Tyger, The Lamb; published in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”

William Blake, British Romanticist Poet and Artist

Identify the poet, nationality, and movement:

The Tyger: (1794)
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

(KNOW THE BOLD.)

Read the full poem: here

William Blake, British Romanticist Poet and Artist

(Know the bolded passage!)

Identify the poet, nationality, movement, and theme:

The Lamb (1789):

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee […..]

Read the full poem: here

Country, Time Period, Movement, Known For, Major Works (3), Minor (2)

John Donne

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1570-1630ish
• Movement: Metaphysical
• Known For: Being highly religious and even became an Anglican priest. He wrote “Death Be Not Proud” and “Meditation 17” that includes the poem “No Man is an Island.”

“Beaten Gold or a compass are two conceits used in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Buzz in for “British metaphysical poet” IMMEDIATELY

Major: Death Be Not Proud, No Man Is an Island, Meditation XVII, Minor: Break of Day, Valediction: Forbidden Mourning

Identify the poet and movement:

Sonnet X (or, “Death Be Not Proud”) (1609)
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne, British Metaphysical Poet

(Recognize that opening line. It’s quoted often.)

(The Metaphysical poets were a group of 17th-century English poets. Their work is known for using complex images and conceits, and for using intellectual arguments to express emotions)

Identify the poet and movement; know the bold passages.

No Man is an Island (1623):

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

(This is PART of the larger work, Meditation XVII)

John Donne, British Metaphysical Poet

Identify the poet, movement, and the book title the bolded inspired:

Meditation XVII (1623):

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. […]

(This CONTAINS the poem “No Man is an Island” later on)

Read the full text: here

John Donne, British Metaphysical Poet

The passage inspired the title of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway.

(Donne wrote this while suffering from a nearly fatal cold and fever.)

Identify the poet:

Break of Day (1633):

‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ‘tis light?
Did we lie down because ‘twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together. […]

Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.

Read the full poem: here

John Donne, British Metaphysical Poet

(This starts as a traditional love poem about lovers seperating at dawn, but then takes a turn into a woman complaining about the man’s priorities.)

Literary Term:

This is a literary term defined as an elaborate simile or metaphor often found in metaphysical poetry that makes a comparison between two significantly different things.

Identify the poet, movement, and identify a conceit used:

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (1611)

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love. […]

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do. […]

John Donne, British Metaphysical Poet

• Donne uses the conceit of a compass to compare two souls. In this metaphor, one leg of the compass is fixed and represents one soul, while the other leg is free to move and symbolizes the other soul. The fixed foot remains stable and steadfast, much like one soul in the relationship, while the other foot can roam and explore, yet it is always connected to the fixed foot
• The other conceit is beaten gold: This process of beating gold is a metaphor for the souls stretching and expanding without breaking. The choice of gold as the metaphor adds a layer of preciousness and value to the nature of their connection.

(The question was “name two conceits from ‘A Valediction.”)

This is a love poem from Donne to his wife before a trip from Britain to continental Europe.

Country, Time Period, Known For:

Rudyard Kipling

• Country: British India, born in Bombay, India
• Time Period: 1865 - 1940
• Known For: Writing The Jungle Book (a story about a child being raised by jungle animal friends), writing a 1888 collection of children’s short stories in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories; racist short story Gunga Din; Rikki Tikki Tavi; Kim; The Man Who Would Be King

The Jungle Book (Collection); Wee Willie Winkie (Collection), Rikki Tikki Tavi, Gunga Din, The Man Who Would Be King, Kim

Additional Information: (Known for which garment? Relative? Award?)

Rudyard Kipling

• Kipling is known for wearing and collecting pith helmets (round, colonial British expedition hats they’d wear on safari - you know the ones.)
• His cousin, Stanley Baldwin, became prime minister of England.
• Won the Nobel Prize in 1907.
• Kipling used his influence to get his only son John Kipling an officer position in the British military prior to WW1 despite his disqualification for poor eyesight. He was killed in battle at age 18.

Identify the poet. know the last line:

Gunga Din (1890)

‘E would dot an’ carry one
Till the longest day was done,
An’ ‘e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin’ nut,
‘E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.

[…]

’E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
’E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ’e died,
‘I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.
So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

Read the full poem: here

Rudyard Kipling, British (Colonial Indian) Poet

Know the line “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

This vaguely racist poem is about a native Indian Hindu water boy that always brought the British soldiers water, no matter what, and then was ultimately killed.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, British (Colonial Indian) Poet

Identify the title and author:

This is an 1888 short story about two British colonizers that convince natives in Kafirstan (Afghanistan) that they are gods and become kings. Their greed and hubris becomes their undoing.

The Man Who Would Be King (1888) by Rudyard Kipling

Identify the title and author:

This is an 1894 short story within Rudyard Kipling’s collection “The Jungle Book” about the adventures of a mongoose as he battles against a scheming cobra.

Rikki Tikki Tavi (1894), by Rudyard Kipling, British (Colonial Indian) Poet

Identify the poet, know the bolded text:

“If” (1895)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

(The poem ends with, “then you’re a real man!” or something toxic.)

Rudyard Kipling, British (Colonial Indian) Poet

Rudyard Kipling, British (Colonial Indian) Poet and Author

Country, Time Period, Movement, Work Known For (1):

William Cullen Bryant

• Country: American (from Massachussetts)
• Time Period: 1790 - 1880
• Movement: Romanticist, Fireside Poet
• Known For: Thanatopsis

Thanatopsis

Identify the poet, country, and movement:

Thanatopsis (1817):

To him, who in the love of Nature holds,
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice— […]

William Cullen Bryant, American Fireside Romantic Poet

(This is just a classic Romantic poem about connection to nature, the inevitability of death, unity with everything, etc. etc.)

Country, Time Period, Movement, Other Career:

William Carlos Williams

(No works mentioned.)

• Country: American (from New Jersey)
• Time Period: 1880 - 1960
• Movement: Imagism
• Known For: American Imagist poet and medical doctor. No works listed.

(Imagism: early-20th-century poetry that favored precision and more direct imagery and clear, sharp language)

Country, Time Period, Era, Cause of Early Death, Known For:

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1560 - 1590ish
• Era: Elizabethan-Era
• Cause of Death: Killed in a barfight in 1593 at age 29.
• Known For: Being one of the first to explore the use of blank verse in his plays, writing the poem “The Passionate Shephard to His Love”, and the plays “The Jew of Malta,” “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” “Edward II,” and “Tamburlaine the Great.”

Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, “Edward II” (play), The Passionate Shephard to His Love

Identify:

This Elizabethan-era poet and playwright is known for their first play Tamburlaine the Great, (1587) loosely based on the life of Central Asian emperor Timur and the play “King Edward II (1594),” a gay love story about the relationship between King Edward II of England and his lover, Piers Gaveston.

(The titles, not plots are important here.)

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, British Elizabethan-era poet

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Elizabeth-era Poet

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, British Elizabethan-era poet

Identify the love-bombing poet below:

The Passionate Shephard to His Love (1599):

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle; […]

(Know the bolded first line.)

Read the full poem: here

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, British Elizabethan-Era Poet

Robert Herrick

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1590-1670ish
• Movement: Cavalier Poet
• Known For: “Carpe diem” (or “seize the day!”) themes and the beauty of the English countryside; author of the poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

Works: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Cavalier poet with John Suckling, Richard Lovelace.

Identify the poet and movement; know the bolded:

To the Virgins, to Make Much of TIme (1648):

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

Robert Herrick, British Cavalier Poet

John Milton

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1610 - 1670ish
• Movement: Renaissance
• Known For: Going blind in the middle of his life (he dictated the epic “Paradise Lost” to his daughters). His minor works include “Il Penseroso”, “L’Allegro,” and “Samson Agonistes.”

“When I consider how my light is spent”
the mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav’n of hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (paradise lost)

Major Work: Paradise Lost, When I Consider How My Light is Spent

Minor Works: Il Penseroso, L’Allegro, Samson Agonistes
Note: “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” is also called “On His Blindness”

John Milton, British Renaissance Poet

Identify the poet and movement; know the bolded line:

Sonnet 19 - When I Consider How My Light is Spent (or, “On His Blindness”) (1655):

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

John Milton, British Renaissance Poet

Identify the poem and author from the bolded text:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him his best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
[…..]

Read the full poem: here

Paradise Lost by John Milton, British Renaissance Poet

Read the full poem: here

Country, TimePeriod, Movement, Cause of Early Death, Known for (4):

Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Also know his spouse.)

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1790 - 1820ish
• Movement: Romanticism
• Known For: Author of many major works: “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “Prometheus Unbound,” “Ode to the West Wind.”
• Cause of Death: PBS drowned on Monday, July 8, 1822 at age 29 in a sudden storm while trying to swim back to his sailboat.
• Spouse: After his first wife committed suicide, PBS married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1816, who then took his name and became Mary Shelley. Yes, that Mary Shelley.

(What’s with all these poets dying at age 29? Him and Kit Marlowe both.)

Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias, To a Skylark, Prometheus Unbound

Identify the poem and poet from the bolded lines:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
[…]
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

(The final line comes up a LOT.)

Ode to the West Wind (1819) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, British Romanticist Poet

Identify the poet from the poem’s bolded lines:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is (the poem’s name), King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias (1817) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, British Romanticist Poet

Bysshe-Shelley wrote this in a friendly competition with a poet friend.

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” - Ramesses II (“Ozymandias”) arrogantly believes his dominion would endure indefinitely, but the author is looking at the remains of a statue that is crumbling and forgotten amid the nothingness of a desert.

Identify the poem and poet from the bolded passage:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. […]

Read the full poem: here

To a Skylark (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley, British Romanticist Poet

(Note: A-Team incorrectly refers to this poem as “Ode to a Skylark”)

Prometheus Unbound (1820) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, British Romanticist Poet

Read the full poem: here

Wallace Stevens

• Country: American, from Pennsylvania
• Time Period: 1880 - 1955ish
• Movement: Modernism (never asked about)
• Known For: “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” published in his poetry collection Harmonium.

(No other works are mentioned in A-Team lore.)

Identify the poet:

The Emperor of Ice Cream (1922):
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let “be” be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

(The first part is about life, the second about death.)

This is such a challenging poem to understand. Here’s a YouTube video on it: here

Wallace Stevens, American Modernist Poet

Dylan Thomas

• Country: Welsh (from Wales)
• Time Period: 1915 - 1950ish
• Movement: Modernism (not mentioned)
• Known For: “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” “Fern Hill”
• Cause of Death: Thomas died at age 39 of alcoholism (and potentially undiagnosed diabetes) in New York with $100 to his name.

Do not go gentle into that good night; fern hill

Identify the poet:

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (1947):
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas, Welsh Modernist Poet

Identify the poet:

“Fern Hill” (1945):
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light. […..]

Read the full poem: [here]https://poets.org/poem/fern-hill)

Dylan Thomas, American Modernist Poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Identify the poet; know the first and last lines:

Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 (1845):

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British Victorian-era Poet

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British Victorian-era Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (2):

Carl Sandburg

Country: American (from Chicago)
Time Period: 1880 - 1970ish
Movement: Modernist (never mentioned)
Known For: The poems Fog and Chicago (where he’s from)

(He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.)

Major Works: Fog, Chicago

Identify the poet:

Fog (1916):

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

(That’s the end of the poem.)

Carl Sandburg, American Modernist Poet

Identify the poet and poem:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

Read the full poem: here

Chicago (1913) by Carl Sandburg, American Modernist Poet

(Carl is defending his city against its rough reputation.)

Gwendolyn Brooks

• Country: American (from Topeka, Kansas)
• Time Period: 1920 - 2000ish
• Movement: Modernism
• Known For: Author of The Lovers of the Poor and “We Real Cool.” She was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her second collection “Annie Allen” in 1950.

Works: The Lovers of the Poor, We Real Cool

Identify the Poet:

The Lovers of the Poor (1960):

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens! […]

Read the full poem: here

Gwendolyn Brooks, American Modernist Poet

(The poem satirizes the rich, white women from the “Ladies’ Betterment League” who give superficial charity to the poor.)

Identify the poet:

We Real Cool (1959):
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks, American Modernist Poet

(This poem is about seven teenagers hanging out outside a pool hall. They dropped out of school, drink underage, defy authority, and will likely pay for their behavior with their lives.)

Country, Time Period, Known For:

Nikki Giovanni

Country: American (from Tennessee)
Time Period: 1940 - present
Known For: Being a leader in the Black Arts movement, her poem “Woman”

Works: Woman

Identify the poet:

Woman (2013):
she wanted to be a blade
of grass amid the fields
but he wouldn’t agree
to be a dandelion

she wanted to be a robin singing
through the leaves
but he refused to be
her tree
[…]

she decided to become
a woman
and though he still refused
to be a man
she decided it was all
right

Read the full poem: here

Nikki Giovanni, American Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Spouse, Known For (2):

Robert Browning

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1810 - 1890ish
• Movement: Victorian-era
• Known For: His poems “The Last duch*ess” and “The Pied Piper of Hamlin.” He was married to “How Do I Love Thee?” poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Works: My Last duch*ess, Pied Piper of Hamlin

Identify the poet:

My Last duch*ess (1842):
That’s my last duch*ess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus.

Read the full poem: here

Robert Browning, British Victorian Poet

(The widowed Duke of Ferrara is looking for a new bride and uses a painting of his deceased wife to strike up a conversation with a guest.)

Identify the poet:

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842):

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.
Rats!

They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And eat the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats. [….]

Read the full poem: here

Robert Browning, British Victorian Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (7):

Thomas Hardy

• Country: Thomas Hardy
• Time Period: 1840 - 1930ish
• Movement: Victorian (never mentioned)
• Known For: Author of “Return of the Native”
  “The Men Who Marched Away” (about WWI)
  “The Darkling Thrush”
  created a character Clym Yeobright
  The Return of the Native (Edgon Heath is the setting)
  British author of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, and Far From the Madding Crowd
  “Channel Firing”

Identify the poet:

The Darkling Thrush (1899):
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

Read the full poem: here

Thomas Hardy, British Victorian Poet

(Written in 1899, the poem is reflecting on the end of the 19th Century as a bleak winter, but sees hope in the form of a bird through religious faith.)

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (1):

A.E. Housman

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1860 - 1940
• Movement: Romantic, but not mentioned.
• Known For: Author of the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young.”

Identify the poem, poet, and special occasion occuring in the poem:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Read the full poem: here

To an Athlete Dying Young by A.E. Housman, British Victorian-era Poet

The event described is a funeral.

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (3):

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1770 - 1830
• Movement: Romanticism
• Known For: Collaborating with William Wordsworth on the poetry collection that launched the Romaticism movement: Lyrical Ballads; author of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.”

Works: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Lyrical Ballads (Collection with William Wordsworth)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaborated with this fellow poet on Lyrical Ballads, a 1798 collection of poems said to start the Romantic movement in England.

William Wordsworth, British Romantic Poet

“Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800) is considered the Romantic Manfesto.

Identify the poem and poet:

It is an (part of the title of the poem),
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? […..]

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Read the full poem: here

Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British Romanticist Poet

This is an ocean adventure gone wrong. The captain accidentally kills an albatross (a bird), a symbol of good luck. The crew starves and dies, and the captain prays and appreciates beauty and nature and survives.

Identify the poem and poet from the bolded line:

[…..]
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The (title of the poem), whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

Read the full poem: here

Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British Romanticist Poet

(The saying “an albatross around (one’s) neck” comes from this poem.)

This is an ocean adventure gone wrong. The captain accidentally kills an albatross (a bird), a symbol of good luck. The crew starves and dies, and the captain prays and appreciates beauty and nature and survives.

An Albatross

(The albatross is still used today as a symbol of guilt or weight.)

Identify the poet and know the bolded portions:

Kubla Khan (or, “A Vision in a Dream”) (1797):
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Read the full poem: here

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British Romanticist Poet

(This poem was from STC’s trippy, opioid-fueled fever dream.)

This is the location of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome where people eat honey-dew and drink the milk of Paradise.

Identify the poem:

From which the following lyrics are derived:
“To seek the
sacred river Alph/ To walk the caves of ice/ To break my fast on honeydew/ And drink the
milk of paradise … “

This poet’s tombstone epitaph reads:

“Beneath this sod
A Poet lies; or that which once was he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.
That he, who many a year with toil of breath.
Found Death in Life, may here find Life in Death”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British Romantic Poet

(His coffin was found in a wine cellar beneath St. Michael’s Church in London)

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (6):

T.S. Elliot

• Country: Born American, turned British Citizen
• Time Period: 1890 - 1965ish
• Movement: Modernist
• Known For: Poems about World War I and cats, the play “Murder in the Cathedral” (about the assassination of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canturbury), and the following poems:
  
  • “Hollow Men”
  • “The Wasteland”
  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  • “Journey of the Magi”
  • “Macavity - The Mystery Cat”

Identify the poet, know the last line:

Hollow Men (1925):
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men. […]
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Read the full poem: here

T.S. Eliot, American turned British Modernist Poet

(This poem, like many of Eliot’s, reflects feelings of emptiness and despair in post-WW1 Europe.)

Identify the poet:

The Wasteland (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. […..]

Read the full poem: here

T.S. Eliot, American turned British Modernist Poet

(Yet another WW1 despair poem.)

(The opening line, “April is the cruellest month” is meant to contrast “The Canterbury Tales’” opening line about April being a month of rebirth.)

The Fire Sermon

(Just some weird trivia that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.)

Identify the poet:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1911):

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?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. […..]

Read the full poem: here

T.S. Eliot, American-turned-British Modernist Poet

(This poem, the first ever Eliot published, is about a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something to you, the reader of the poem, but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not.)

Identify the poet:

The Journey of the Magi (1927):

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly. [….]

Read the full poem: here

T.S. Eliot, American-turned-British Modernist Poet

(The poem describes the terrible conditions through which the Magi traversed to meet baby Jesus after His birth.)

Identify the poet:

This poet’s collection of cat-related poems in The Book of Practical Cats includes titles such as “Macavity - The Mystery Cat,” “Gus - The Theater Cat” and “Skimbleshanks - The Railway Cat” The collection is later used as the basis for the long-running Broadway musical “Cats” by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

T.S. Eliot, American-turned-British Modernist Poet

Country, Time Period, Movement, Known For (5):

George Gordon Lord Byron

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1788 - 1824
• Movement: Romantic
• Known For: The poems ““She Walks in Beauty”, “So We’ll Go No More a Roving”, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the mock epic “Don Juan”, and the play in blank verse “Sardanapalus.”
• The term “Byronic Hero,” a brooding, gloomy, mysterious hero is named after Lord Byron.

Works: She Walks in Beauty, So We’ll Go No More a Roving, Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Sardanapalus (play)

Identify the:

• Romantic British poet born in London in 1788 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1805.
• This poet’s personal life was fraught with debt and debauchery.
• I was always extremely sensitive about a birth defect.
• They often wrote of the moody, passionate, remorseful yet unrepentant wanderer, so much so that a type of hero has this poet’s namesake as a gloomy loner.
• Their personal reputation suffered from rumors which led them to leave England.
• They fought for Greek independence from Turkey.
• They died in 1824 from a fever.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Romanticist Poet

(The “birth defect” is a misshapen or “club” foot.)

(A “Byronic Hero” is a character notable for being sullen, withdrawn, hard to like and hard to know, but usually possessing a rich inner life and a softer side accessible only to a special few. So edgy.)

Identify the poet:

She Walks in Beauty (1814):

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Romanticist Poet

(Lord Byron sees an stunningly beautiful woman at a party in London in 1814. It’s his cousin’s wife. Messy.)

Identify the poet and recognize the bolded passage:

So We’ll Go No More a Roving (1817):

So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Romanticist Poet

(The message here to his friend is, “I’m about to turn 30 and I’m feeling old. I can’t keep up with the younger partyers like I used to, and I’m really feeling it this morning.”)

Identify the poet:

This poet’s longer works include a poem in four parts called “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812) where a partier gets bored of partying and seeks a different life in a foreign land, and the mock epic Don Juan (1824), where the author takes the suave, womanizing Spanish folk hero and portrays him as someone easily seduced and manipulated by women.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: here
Don Juan: here

George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Romanticist Poet

Identify the poet:

This poet’s play Sardanapalus had an extensive impact on the European Romanticist movement, inspiring a painting by Delacroix and musical works by Berlioz, Liszt and Ravel, among others.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Romanticist Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (4):

e e Cummings

• Country: American, from Massachussetts
• Time Period: 1890 - 1960ish
• Movement: Modernist (never mentioned)
• Known For:
  
  • Unusual punctuation and a lack of capitalization in his poems and even in his name (like Emily Dickinson - be careful.)
  • Poem: “Age Old Sticks”
  • Poem: “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”
  • Poem: “Thy Fingers May Early Flowers Of”
  • Poem: “In Just – “

Identify the poet:

“Thy fingers make early flowers of” (1923):
Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings,saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says;singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death,Thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing,it shall not stop kissing).

e e Cummings, American Modernist Poet

Identify the poet:

in Just – (1920)

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and the
goat footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

(That’s his formatting and spacing, not mine.)

e e Cummings, American Modernist Poet

The “goat-footed ballon man may be Pan, the Greek god of the wild.

Identify the poet, recognize the bolded:

anyone lived in a pretty how town (1940):

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more […]

Read the full poem: here

e e Cummings, American Modernist Poet

(A man named Anyone lived in a quaint, ordinary town where bells frequently chimed. Season after season, he was open about all the things he hadn’t done but celebrated all that he was able to accomplish. None of the men or women in the town cared about Anyone.)

Identify the poet:

age old sticks (1958):

Old age sticks up keep off signs
& youth yanks them down
Old age cries no tress
& pass
Youth laughs
Sing old age scolds forbidden stop
Mustn’t don’t &
Youth goes right on growing old.

e e Cummings

This is another “circle of life” poem - even youth becomes old.

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (2):

Edwin Arlington Robinson

• Country: American, from Maine
• Time Period: 1870 - 1935
• Movement: Modernist
• Known For: One of the first modernist poets, wrote
  “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy.”

Fun Fact: Robinson’s parents wanted a girl and didn’t name him until he was six months old, when his parents went on vacation and the other vacationers insisted he needed a name. One man drew the name “Edwin” out of a hat of boy’s names. The man was from Arlington, Virginia.

Identify the poet and recognize the character from the bolded:

Richard Cory (1897):

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson, American Modernist Poet

(If you haven’t read the poem, read it. It’s dark.)

(Edwin’s handsome, weathy, successful older brother married Emma, the woman Edwin loved, but his brother became an alcoholic, his businesses failed, and he died in poverty of tuberculosis. Emma is convinced the poem is about Edwin’s brother.)

Identify the poet:

Miniver Cheevy (1910):

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors. […..]

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

Read the full poem: here

Edwin Arlington Robinson, American Modernist Poet

Identify the movement:

John Suckling

Cavalier Poet

That’s all you need to know.

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (2):

Edward Taylor

• Country: American, from Massachussettts (although born in England)
• Time Period: 1640 - 1730
• Movement: “American Baroque” and “Metaphysical” (neither is ever mentioned)
• Known For: He was an American Puritan poet and minister who lived in Massachusetts. Although born in England, his thirst for religious freedom led him to the Bay Colony. His poetry is full of imagery drawn from the countryside of New England. His poems include “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” and “Huswifery.”

Works: Upon a Spider Catching a Fly; Huswifery

Fun Fact: His poetry wasn’t discovered until 1930, 200 years after his death.

Identify the poet:

This American Puritan’s poems include “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” and “Huswifery.”

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly: here
Huswifery: here

Edward Taylor

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (2):

Anne Bradstreet

• Country: British, immigrated to Massachussetts at age 18.
• Time Period: 1610 - 1670ish
• Movement: Puritanism (never mentioned)
• Known For: She was the first Puritan figure in American literary history and is best known for her poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and her poetry collection “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.”

Works: To My Dear and Loving Husband; The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (collection)

Identify the poet, know the opening line:

To My Dear and Loving Husband (1678):

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Anne Bradstreet, British-American Puritan Poet

Identify the poet:

This poet’s brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, went to England in 1650 and arranged, without their knowledge, to publish several of their poems in the book, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

Anne Bradstreet, British-American Puritan Poet

Identify the poet:

An aristocrat by birth, this poet used her writing to embody the experience of settlers in the New World as she addressed the hardships as well as domestic happiness and religious faith of her Puritan community. She wrote the first volume of original verse to be published in America which includes the poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”

Anne Bradstreet, British-American Puritan Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (1):

Seamus Heaney

• Country: Irish
• Time Period: 1940 - 2010ish
• Movement: Modernism
• Known For: The poem “Digging.”

Works: Digging

Identify the poet:

Digging (1966):

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands. […..]

Read the full poem: here

Seamus Heaney, Irish Modernist Poet

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (1):

Sir Philip Sidney

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1550 - 1590ish
• Movement: Renaissance
• Known For: The collection of poems “Astrophel and Stella”, one of the earliest English collections of sonnets.

Identify:

This collection of poems by Sir Philip Sidney published in 1591 is named after a combination of the Greek words for “Star Lover” and the Latin word for “Star.”

Astrophel and Stella (1591) by Sir Philip Sidney, British Renaissance Poet

(Literally, “astro-phile” and “Stella”)

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (1):

Richard Lovelace

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1620 - 1660
• Movement: Cavalier Poets
• Known For: The poem, “To Althea, From Prison,” which includes the line “stone walls do not a prison make.”

Appears often in “which is not a Cavalier Poet?” questions.

An A-Team question set erroneously attributed the prison quote to Andrew Marvell. It’s Richard Lovelace. The three Cavalier Poets: Robert Herrick, John Suckling, Richard Lovelace.

Identify the poet and recognize the bolded lines:

To Althea, from Prison (1642):

When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye,
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty. […..]

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such Liberty.

Read the full poem: here

Richard Lovelace, British Cavalier Poet

(He went to prison for demanding to Parliament that Charles I be restored to power after a conflict between the king and parliament.)

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (1):

Audre Lorde

• Country: American, from New York
• Time Period: 1930-1990ish
• Movement: Feminist, Black Arts Movement (never mentioned)
• Known For: “Hanging Fire”

Works: Hanging Fire

Identify the poet:

Hanging Fire (1978):
I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy
what if I die
before morning
and momma’s in the bedroom
with the door closed.

I have to learn how to dance
in time for the next party
my room is too small for me
suppose I die before graduation
they will sing sad melodies
but finally
tell the truth about me
There is nothing I want to do
and too much
that has to be done
and momma’s in the bedroom
with the door closed.

Nobody even stops to think
about my side of it
I should have been on Math Team
my marks were better than his
why do I have to be
the one
wearing braces
I have nothing to wear tomorrow
will I live long enough
to grow up
and momma’s in the bedroom
with the door closed.

Audre Lorde, American Feminist Poet

(This is high school anxiety in a poem. Read it.)

Country, TIme Period, Movement, Known For (4):

Sylvia Plath

• Country: American, from Massachussetts
• Time Period: 1930 - 1960ish
• Movement: Categorized as “Confessional Poetry”, but never mentioned
• Known For:
  
  • Her unhappy life and severe depression (she tried to kill herself three times, once successfully).
  • Her spiral towards depression is best reflected in her semi-autobiographical book “The Bell Jar.”
  • Some of her famous poems include “Daddy”, “Mirror”, and “Metaphors” (which is about pregnancy.)
  • She was married to fellow poet Ted Hughes.

Works: Daddy; Metaphors; Mirror; the novel “The Bell Jar”

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, American Poet

Identify the poet:

This poet was married to Ted Hughes, poet laureate of England and the author of “The Hawk in the Rain.”

Sylvia Plath, American Poet

Identify the poet:

Daddy (1965):

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

**Daddy, I have had to kill you. **
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du. […..]

Read the full poem: here

Sylvia Plath, American Poet

Plath’s father died when she was eight. In this poem, written four months before her death and one month after her separation from Ted Hughes, she calls her dad a “Nazi”, a “giant statue”, a “confining shoe”, and a “vampire.”

Identify the poet and subject of the poem:

Metaphors (1959):

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Sylvia Plath, American Poet
The poem is about pregnancy.

Identify the poet:

Mirror (1961):

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath, American Poet

Ted Hughes

• Country: British
• Time Period: 1930 - 2000ish
• Movement: Modernism
• Known For: The poems “The Hawk in the Rain”, “The Horses”, “Hawk Roosting”, and the collection of poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, “Birthday Letters.”

Works: Hawk in the Rain, Hawk Roosting, The Horses, and the collection Birthday Letters.

Identify the poet:

This poet was born in West Yorkshire and spent most of his youth hunting and fishing. His love of the outdoors was reflected in many of his poems, like “The Horses (1957)” and “Hawk Roosting (1960).” Both his wife and his mistress committed suicide. His book, Birthday Letters (published 1998), is a collection of poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath.

Ted Hughes, British Modernist Poet

Identify the poet:

This poet was the poet laureate of England. He was the author of The Hawk in the Rain and was married to Sylvia Plath.

Ted Hughes, British Modernist Poet

Edna St. Vincent Millay

• Country: American, from Maine
• Time Period: 1890 - 1950ish
• Movement: Modernism
• Known For: Being an American poet during WW1 and the Roaring 20s.

(None of her works are mentioned.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Country: American, from Massachussetts
• Time Period: 1800 - 1880
• Movement: Transcendentalism
• Known For:
  
  • Closely associated with being a leader of the Transcendentalist movement and the essay Nature, where he argues that humans and nature should peacefully coexist.
  • Known for the Civil War poem Concorde Hymn” in which the phrase “the shot heard ‘round the world” was coined.
  • His essay Self-Reliance and his speech to Harvard students “The American Scholar” is a popular call for independent thought.

“Men are what their mothers made them.”

Always associated with Emerson: American, transcendentalism, Self-Reliance, Concorde Hymn and the “shot heard round the world”, Nature.

Identify the poet:

After attending Harvard, this poet became a Unitarian minister. After his wife died, he left the ministry and made a living as a lecturer. In an address to students at his alma mater called “The American Scholar”, he demanded that American scholars free themselves from the shackles of the past. He later developed the movement known as Transcendentalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Transcendentalist Poet

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Transcendentalist Poet

Identity the poet:

This American lecturer’s 1837 work, “The American Scholar,” describes the resources and duties of the new, liberated intellectual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Transcendentalist Poet

Identify the poet, and know the very famous bolded line:

Concord Hymn (1837):

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Transcendentalist Poet

Adrienne Rich

• Country: American, from Maryland
• Time Period: 1930 - 2010ish
• Movement: Feminist Movement
• Known For: Poet during Vietnam war and the poem “Diving into the Wreck. (1973)”

Phillis Wheatley

• Country: American, from Massachussetts (but kidnapped from West Africa.)
• Time Period: 1753-1784
• Movement: American Revolution-era Poetry (never mentioned)
• Known For: Her 1773 publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral made her the first published African-American poet. She expressed her love for George Washington in “To His Excellency General Washington.”

(Phillis was kidnapped and sold into slavery to the Wheatley family of Boston. She learned to write and published her collection of poems on a trip to London with the Wheatley’s son. She was freed shortly after, but died at 31 in poverty and obscurity.)

Identify the poet:

She was the very first black American to publish poetry. She personified America as the goddess Columbia. George Washington was her hero, and he was a fan of hers.

Phillis Wheatley

• Country: British
• Time Period:
• Movement:
• Known For: “Mirrors of our Time”

So mysterious.

(There’s literally no information on this person. He’s a distractor choice.)

Country, Time Period, Movement, Known For (3):

Robert Burns

• Country: Scottish
• Time Period: 1760 - 1800ish
• Movement: Romanticism
• Known For: Being a pioneer of the Romantic period, his poem “To a Mouse” whose famous line “the best laid schemes o’ mouse and men” inspired the title of Hemingway’s “Of Mice and Men,” his poem “A Red, Red Rose” and “Auld Lang Syne” (which was turned into the very famous New Year’s song.)

Robert Burns compared me to his love. (a rose)
“to a mouse” - where title “of mouse and men” came from

Works: To a Mouse, A Red, Red Rose, Auld Lang Syne

Identify the poet and the book inspired by the bolded line:

To a Mouse (1785):

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal! […..]

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!