Contexts of World Poetry After 1925 - AP English Literature and Composition

Omeros (1990)is a contemporary Caribbean re-envisioning Homer’s Iliad. Omeros is set in modern-day St. Lucia but includes contemporary versions of Iliad characters such as Achilles and Hector (fishermen in this work), Philoctete and Helen, and a blind seer. It also includes characters that are not taken from Homer, such as Sergeant Major Plunkett.

John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), Virgil's The Aeneid, and Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy (1472) were all used as alternative answer choices.

Walcott's Omeros (1990) is a contemporary epic, spanning several hundred pages and divided into seven “books” and more than 60 chapters. In this way it echoes its inspiration, The Iliad, which is also an epic poem.

Derek Walcott was born in the same place that he sets Omeros (1990): St. Lucia.

This is the Nobel Prize-winning Eastern European poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004). In addition to Unattainable Earth (1984), he is also known for his collections City Without a Name (1969), Native Realm (1959), and Road-side Dog (1997)as well as for a famous anti-Stalin nonfiction work, The Captive Mind (1953).

Czesław Miłosz is known first and foremost to critics as a Polish writer and spent World War II in Warsaw, although he has notably refused to identify either as a Lithuanian or as a Pole. He has won a number of prizes from other nations, though, including the Prix Littéraire Européen and the U.S. National Medal of Arts.

Along with poet Robert Pinksy, Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass (1941-present) is known for his translations of Miłosz’s works, including Provinces (1991), Facing the River (1995), The Separate Notebooks (1984), and Road-Side Dog (1997).

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014), and Stanisław Barańczak (1946-2014) were all 20th-century Polish writers. Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) was also a Polish poet, but he lived and wrote during the Renaissance.

This is the Latin American poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Peace Prize. Neruda published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in 1924.

Pablo Neruda was born in Chile. In addition to writing collections such as 100 Love Sonnets (1959), The Book of Questions (1974), and Canto General (1950), Neruda served as a politician and poet-diplomat (a role played by other Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz and Miguel Angel Asturias Rosales) for his country for many years.

Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he wrote under his pen name (and later formally adopted it) because his working-class parents disapproved of his poetry. He based the pen name on the Czech Realist poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891) and the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). The rest of the names listed here are real (albeit more obscure) Latin American writers.

As is hinted at in the title, most of the works in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)are erotic love poems. Although Neruda wrote in many different styles and forms (including prose, poetry, realism, surrealism, autobiography, and political manifesto), he is perhaps best known for his love poetry, including various sonnets and odes.

Autobiography of Red (1998)is a work by Anne Carson.

A.E. Housman wrote Last Poems (1922), Seamus Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist (1966), Adrienne Rich wrote Twenty-one Love Poems (1976), and Mary Oliver wrote The Night Traveler (1978).

Red Doc> (2013)is a 21st-century sequel to Autobiography of Red (1998). The other titles are all by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese was published in 1850, Last Poems was published in 1862, _Aurora Leigh_was published in 1857, and Casa Guidi Windows was published in 1851.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, translator, and nonfiction writer.

The Autobiography of Red was published in 1998.

While Autobiography of Red (1998)is loosely based on the Greek myth of Geryon, and despite its title, it is neither translation nor memoir/creative nonfiction. The work is a fragmentary, lyric novel told in verse.

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)is by the poet Octavio Paz.

Julio Cortázar wrote Hopscotch (1963), Gabriel García Márquez wrote Leaf Storm (1955), José Emilio Pacheco wrote Don't Ask Me How the Time Goes by: Poems (1978), and Laura Esquivel wrote Like Water for Chocolate (1989).

Octavio Paz is a Mexican writer who also served as a diplomat for his country.

The Labyrinth of Solitude was published in 1950.

The Labyrinth of Solitude, which explores Mexico’s heritage and the behavior of Paz’s countrymen, first appeared in 1950.

Octavio Paz wrote Sunstone (1956), The Double Flame (1994), In Light of India (1997), Airborn (1979), and Renga: A Chain of Poems (1972). The Dream (1692)is bythe 17th-century Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz.