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.

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.

The erotically-infused poems of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair caused an uproar when the collection was published in 1924. In addition to its literary worth, the fact that a 19-year-old, Pablo Neruda, wrote about such topics was considered scandalous. Neruda would remain a well known literary figure for the next fifty years of his life, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

"Confessional poetry" is a term denoting poetry that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s that saw poets admit to mental illness, past traumas, and other personal issues. Anne Sexton was considered the model confessional poet, and her work was considered controversial because of the large number of typically verboten subjects she covered. Her Live or Die, which chronicled her struggles with mental illness in a series of blank verse poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967.

The Waste Land is a lengthy poem, spanning nearly 434 lines, and narrates a modernist story about the Fisher King and the Holy Grail. A landmark of Modernist Poetry from its initial publication in 1922, it enhanced the already considerable reputation of its author, T.S. Eliot. An Anglo-American himself, Eliot became one of the most well known writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

World War I was such a large, Europe-wide tragedy and involved such large amounts of young men that it produced a great deal of literature about the war and its issues. Among them were British poets, who were typically quite critical of the politics and the experience of the horrors of trench warfare. Both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are among the poets who are known for writing about WWI.

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).)

Robert Frost lived nearly his entire life in New England, particularly living as an adult in rural New Hampshire, which provided the settings for many of his poems. Although on the surface Frost's poems appeared to be bucolic tales of rural life, a darker subtext was usually present. Frost was a national icon by the time he died in 1963, having won four Pulitzers for poetry and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960.

The poet W.H. Auden had instant success and notoriety with his poems, which featured strict rhyme and metrical schemes, features unusual in the poetry of his time. His "Funeral Blues" was published in 1938, and set to music by the composer Benjamin Britten. "September 1, 1939" was published in October of that same year; it concerns Germany's invasion of Poland and was immediately widely read.

"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.