This is a famous early American poem, “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House July 10^th, 1666,” written by the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet is known for being the first published female writer in the British North American colonies.

Passage adapted from Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” (1666)

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) is Bradstreet’s first volume of poetry. It was a success in both the American colonies and in England, and many of its themes are religious.

Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations (1723), Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1883), and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales (1842) were all used as alternative options.

Passage adapted from Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” (1666)

All of the above authors except for Joel Barlow were Puritan writers. While these authors may have been subverting or interpreting loosely certain religious values in their work, they nonetheless would share a more coherent worldview than Barlow, who espoused atheist leanings in his poetry collection The Columbiad (1807).

Passage adapted from Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” (1666)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the New England group of writers known as the Fireside Poets and the author of “Old Ironsides” (1830), is a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet.

Passage adapted from Anne Bradstreet’s “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” (1666)

These are the opening lines of Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-picking” from North of Boston (1915).

The poet in question is Allen Ginsberg, a leader of the Beats. His most famous work, “Howl,” is an epic poem about minority identities, war, consumerism, sex, and repressive society.

This is Gwendolyn Brooks, author of works such as We Real Cool, Street in Bronzeville, Primer for Blacks, and “Speech to the Young.” Her writing portrays life in inner-city Chicago and encompasses various styles and sensibilities, including jazz influences as well as more formalist verses. She won the Pulitzer in 1950 for her collection titled Annie Allen and was inaugurated as the Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968.

This is Langston Hughes, author of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” Hughes gained acclaim as a poet as well as a social justice advocate, and he was known for writing novels and plays as well as poetry. He helped inaugurate the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, which brought black and urban perspectives to the forefront of music, art, theater, and writing.

The Imagists were known for their emphasis on precision and clarity of diction and images. This movement is linked with the rise of Modernism and includes such founders as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg. The British poet Conrad Aiken, on the other hand, was vocally opposed to various aspects of Imagism.

Of these writers, only Hart Crane was not alive during the Vietnam War. He died in 1932, and the other poets on the list all protested the war in various ways. Some did so through membership in the American Writers Against the Vietnam War (of which Bly was a founder).