The third line reads "In kitchen cups concupiscent curds," featuring the hard "c" sound at the beginning of four words. Such repetition of one sound at the beginning of words in one sentence or phrase is known as "alliteration."

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

Modernism was a movement that spread through many different forms of art in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Modernism rejected what the artists saw as outdated modes. In poetry, the movement was summed up by Ezra Pound's advice to "Make it new!" and Wallace Stevens' use of blank verse, along with T. S. Eliot's writing lengthy epics of mundane life, and E.E. Cummings' reshaping the physical look of poetry. Many modernists were intentionally rejecting the romantic poets like William Wordsworth.

Ezra Pound was an American who made his career in literature in England in the years before World War I, both in his own work and by helping edit and encourage many other poets. His motto was "Make it new," encouraging his fellow poets to create new forms, new modes of descriptions, and new concepts. Pound was a controversial figure, alienating those close to him in his personal life and finding an enthusiasm for Fascism in the 1930s.

Lord Byron, an honorific noble title, was one of the great romantic poets and figures of the early nineteenth century. Byron was most well known for his lengthy and satiric epic poems, with both Don Juan and Childe Harolde's Pilgrimmage spanning over 10,000 lines of verse. Byron himself was a romantic hero, living a wild life and dying at the age of thirty-six in 1824.

The collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised numerous times in new printings, gained its author Walt Whitman literary fame. Whitman's style was notable for featuring a direct style, rather than the typical reliance on metaphor, symbolism, and figures of speech that dominated nineteenth-century poetry. Included in Leaves of Grass were some of Whitman's most famous poems, including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."

The Song of Hiawatha, a lengthy epic in trochaic tetrameter about a Native American hero, was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855. The poem is a distinctively Romantic piece of literature, with a dashing tale about its hero and a sentimentalized story. Longfellow's poem was an instant success and became a national epic for America by the end of the nineteenth century.

The poet Edgar Allen Poe composed and published "The Raven" in 1845, and it was an instant but controversial success. Immediately well-known by the masses, the poem, which deals with a raven visiting a lovelorn student, was scorned by many fellow poets and literary critics. The work, easily memorable for its refrain, remains well known to this day.

"O Captain! My Captain!" was a strange poem for Walt Whitman, as it both followed a fairly traditional structure and was anthologized in a book with different poets. Whitman does rhyme in his eulogy to Lincoln, but also adopts a non-orthodox scheme. The poem has become one of Whitman's most famous, as it was also included in his Leaves of Grass by that book's final edition.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the near-mythical story of a sailor on a cursed ship in the arctic that encounters Death and misfortune after the sailor kills an albatross. The crew blame their luck on the mariner's killing of the albatross, and force him to wear it throughout the voyage.

The passage contains the entirety of Walt Whitman's "America," a short poem published in his collection Leaves of Grass in 1855.

(Passage adapted from "America" by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).)