T. S. Eliot became one of the masters of Modernist poetry with the publication of his 1915 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot was even more lauded for his 1922 poem, The Waste Land. Eliot's poems were lengthy ruminations on the alienation of modern society, and he broke with traditional poetic forms by writing each in inventive blank verse.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" announced T. S. Eliot's arrival on the literary stage, as its publication in 1915 immediately brought the poet notoriety. As the first poem of Eliot's to reach an audience, it bore the hallmarks of his style, with a weight of allusions to literature, while also using dark imagery to create a new form of poetry. In particular, the poem owes a massive debt to Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, while obviously taking place in a modern, industrialized world.

The poem from which the passage is excerpted, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," was written in 1920 by Langston Hughes, an influential poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

(Passage adapted from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes (1921).)

Maya Angelou was the author of both of these poems, in which she depicts the life of an African-American woman in mid-twentieth-century America.

Lorca is a well-known Spanish poet and dramatist; among his works are Odes and Suites, which are each collections of poetry, and El Publico (The Public), a play.

The third line reads "In kitchen cups concupiscent curds," featuring the hard "c" sound at the beginning of four words. Such repetition of one sound at the beginning of words in one sentence or phrase is known as "alliteration."

(Passage adapted from "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens.)

Modernism was a movement that spread through many different forms of art in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Modernism rejected what the artists saw as outdated modes. In poetry, the movement was summed up by Ezra Pound's advice to "Make it new!" and Wallace Stevens' use of blank verse, along with T. S. Eliot's writing lengthy epics of mundane life, and E.E. Cummings' reshaping the physical look of poetry. Many modernists were intentionally rejecting the romantic poets like William Wordsworth.

Ezra Pound was an American who made his career in literature in England in the years before World War I, both in his own work and by helping edit and encourage many other poets. His motto was "Make it new," encouraging his fellow poets to create new forms, new modes of descriptions, and new concepts. Pound was a controversial figure, alienating those close to him in his personal life and finding an enthusiasm for Fascism in the 1930s.

Lord Byron, an honorific noble title, was one of the great romantic poets and figures of the early nineteenth century. Byron was most well known for his lengthy and satiric epic poems, with both Don Juan and Childe Harolde's Pilgrimmage spanning over 10,000 lines of verse. Byron himself was a romantic hero, living a wild life and dying at the age of thirty-six in 1824.

The collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised numerous times in new printings, gained its author Walt Whitman literary fame. Whitman's style was notable for featuring a direct style, rather than the typical reliance on metaphor, symbolism, and figures of speech that dominated nineteenth-century poetry. Included in Leaves of Grass were some of Whitman's most famous poems, including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."