AP English Literature and Composition › Identification of British Poetry After 1925
Which post-war British poet also published detective novels under the name Nicholas Blake and was an ardent supporter of communism in his youth?
Cecil Day-Lewis
T. S. Eliot
W. H. Auden
Hart Crane
Conrad Aiken
Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was known for publishing nearly two dozen detective novels in addition to many collections of poetry. These poetry volumes include titles such as From Feathers to Iron, Pegasus and Other Poems, and The Whispering Roots and Other Poems. Day-Lewis’s style was often conflicted—at times lyrical or romantic, at times aggressively Marxist.
This Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet is famous for works such as “Digging” and his or her modern translation of Beowulf.
Seamus Heaney
W. B. Yeats
Lady Gregory Augusta
Robert Burns
Ted Hughes
Heaney, born in Northern Ireland in 1939, published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and wrote or edited many more critical works, anthologies, and translations. He is considered one of Ireland’s greatest poets.
Which Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet wrote such works as “The Second Coming” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and helped found the Abbey Theatre?
W. B. Yeats
Seamus Heaney
Lady Gregory Augusta
Robert Burns
Ted Hughes
This poet is William Butler Yeats, who, along with Seamus Heaney, is one of Ireland’s best known poets. Born in Dublin in 1865, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and was a major figure in the Irish Literary Revival movement. His work was preoccupied with themes of Irish mythology and transcendentalism, and the poems mentioned above are two of his most famous.
This British poet began one of his best-known works, a highly allusive poem about the small inner torments of a modern man, with the lines “Let us go then, you and I.”
T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
W. B. Yeats
Ted Hughes
e. e. cummings
This poem is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a modernist classic. The poem represented an important shift from older forms of verse to a looser, more imagistic modern form. Eliot, who lived from 1888 to 1965, is one of the best-known British poets of his times, although he was actually born in America. He is known for his critical work such as the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his plays, and his frequently anthologized poems, including “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Four Quartets.” He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Line adapted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot, l.1 (1920)
This Irish poet is better known for his plays Waiting For Godot and Endgame, but his verses show similar qualities: fragmentation, absurdism, deceptively simple diction, and a disregard for grammatical conventions. Who is he?
Samuel Beckett
Jonathan Swift
Seamus Heaney
Oscar Wilde
W. B. Yeats
The poet and playwright in question is Samuel Beckett, who (along with Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Tom Stoppard) is one of the key members of the Theatre of the Absurd. Works that belong to this so-called movement typically include nihilism, wordplay, elements of vaudevillian comedy or downright nonsense mixed with horror or tragedy, and frustration at the apparent meaninglessness of humanity’s place in the world. Although Beckett’s poetry is perhaps the least read of his various creative works, his contributions to the genre were not insignificant, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969.
This poet, who wrote vividly about his experiences at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres in poems concerning World War I, also wrote The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Who is he?
Ford Madox Ford
William Carlos Williams
Hart Crane
Ernest Hemingway
Siegfried Sassoon
Although Sassoon is one of the best known poets of the First World War, the poet in question is actually Ford Madox Ford, who was a novelist as well as an editor and a critic. Among Ford’s volumes of poetry is one he wrote as a soldier during the war: On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service.
This post-war English poet and librarian was known for his obscenity and frank examination of modern life in poems such as “This Be the Verse,” “The Life with a Hole in It” and “Aubade.”
Philip Larkin
Conrad Aiken
Ted Hughes
John Ashbery
Wallace Stevens
The poet described is Philip Larkin, who was born in Coventry in 1922. His poetry is distinguished by a cynical, forthright treatment of romance, children, sexuality, politics, and daily life.
This English-American poet’s most famous poems include “Stop All the Clocks” (alternately titled “Funeral Blues”) and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which he uses Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to examine human suffering and mundane daily life. Who is he?
W. H. Auden
Wallace Stevens
e. e. cummings
T. S. Eliot
Ted Hughes
This poet is W. H. Auden, who wrote everything from limericks and haikus to ballads and villanelles. His work examined romantic relationships, politics, nature, religion, art, and ethics. He lived from 1907 to 1973.
Britain’s current (2015) Poet Laureate has published volumes including Standing Female Nude, Fleshweathercock and Other Poems, and The World’s Wife, the latter of which refigures classically male-centric myths and fairy tales to focus on the female characters. Who is she?
Carol Ann Duffy
Marianne Moore
Mary Oliver
Rita Dove
Anne Waldman
Britain’s current (2015) Poet Laureate is Carol Ann Duffy, a writer whose work is often rooted in fantasy, fairy tales, and feminism.
This modernist poet, famously married to Sylvia Plath, published poetry collections including The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, and Birthday Letters.
Ted Hughes
W. H. Auden
John Ashbery
T. S. Eliot
Wallace Stevens
Born in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes became England's Poet Laureate in 1984 and was a translator and children’s book author in addition to a poet and a critic. Hughes is also known for co-editing the 1982 Rattle Bag and 1997 School Bag anthologies with Irish poet Seamus Heaney.