The poem features a narrator who is attempting to gather everyone for the event. So even though the narrator has a slightly detached view of the event ("Let be be the finale of seem"), the narrator is also deeply involved. There is also a sense of wonder throughout the poem, largely thanks to the narrator's own involvement in the strange circumstances.

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

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is considered the preeminent Beat-era poem, with its stark descriptions of drugs and sexual acts, as well as its use of a blank verse form inspired by jazz. Ginsberg gained instant notoriety when "Howl" was published in 1957, and was brought forward in an obscenity trial in Ginsberg's native California in 1959.

The poem describes a woman's body as "cold" and "dumb," and that it needs to be covered by a sheet, indicating that she is dead. The rest of the poem described gathering people for some kind of event where she is central. Thus, the poem is about a funeral or wake.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay had her first major literary success at age 19, when her lengthy rhyming poem "Renascence" was published by the magazine A Lyric Age. Millay was a throwback in terms of style, employing strict rhyme and meter to write lyrical verses at the time Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings were pushing the boundaries of poetry.

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.