Inspired by a newspaper misprint, “The Man-Moth” (1946) is a poem by the U.S. Poet Laureate Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar (1963), Amy Lowell wrote Ballads for Sale (1927), and Frank O’Hara wrote Oranges: 12 pastorals (1953).

Given that this is Adrienne Rich’s penultimate poetry collection, it makes sense that it would have been published near the end of Rich’s life (1929-2012). Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth was published in 2007.

Along with Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara was an important member of the New York School and contributed greatly to its surrealist, abstract expressionist, and avant-garde aesthetic.

Meditations in an Emergency was published in 1957.

Of these five, only Ginsberg does not write work that is routinely and overtly concerned with the natural world, environment, and ecology.

Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring is Bishop’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection. The rest are the titles of individual poems by Octavio Paz.

H.D. is the pen name of Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961).

Henry Douglas, Henrietta Davenport, and Donald Hughes were not notable American poets at all, but were provided here as alternative names with the initials H.D. The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers (1913).

Helen in Egypt (1961) was H.D's last book of poetry.

The author of the poems in question is Sylvia Plath. She was married to British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes from 1956 until 1963, when she committed suicide. Her work is known for its preoccupation with mental illness and the mundane details of daily life.

By process of elimination, we can rule out all the poets with experimental aspects to their work. William Carlos Williams embraced innovated forms, e e cummings eschewed traditional orthography, Gertrude Stein focused on sonic pattern to the near-exclusion of semantic meaningfulness, and John Ashbery employed avant-garde forms and syntax. This leaves Hart Crane, who embraced some aspects of Modernist poetry but typically followed the older tradition of lyric verse in his work.

The Imagists were known for their emphasis on precision and clarity of diction and images. This movement is linked with the rise of Modernism and includes such founders as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg. The British poet Conrad Aiken, on the other hand, was vocally opposed to various aspects of Imagism.

The only poet on this list who has not been the national Poet Laureate is Bukowski. Levine was Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2012, Trethewey was Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Dove was Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, and Brodsky was Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.