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.

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.

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).)

Le Morte D'Arthur ("The Death of Arthur") is a collection of stories written by Thomas Malory that chronicle the life, adventures, and death of King Arthur.