The author of the poems in question is Sylvia Plath. She was married to British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes from 1956 until 1963, when she committed suicide. Her work is known for its preoccupation with mental illness and the mundane details of daily life.

By process of elimination, we can rule out all the poets with experimental aspects to their work. William Carlos Williams embraced innovated forms, e e cummings eschewed traditional orthography, Gertrude Stein focused on sonic pattern to the near-exclusion of semantic meaningfulness, and John Ashbery employed avant-garde forms and syntax. This leaves Hart Crane, who embraced some aspects of Modernist poetry but typically followed the older tradition of lyric verse in his work.

This is Maya Angelou, the famous author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Clinton’s 1993 inauguration ceremony.

The only poet on this list who has not been the national Poet Laureate is Bukowski. Levine was Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2012, Trethewey was Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Dove was Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, and Brodsky was Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

Of these five, only Ginsberg does not write work that is routinely and overtly concerned with the natural world, environment, and ecology.

Confessionalism, a poetic movement that focuses on individual, often intensely personal, experiences, typically examines issues of psychology, identity, mental illness, sexuality, and cultural taboos. Berryman, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton are all important Confessionalist poets, but Hilda Doolittle (often referred to as “H.D.”) is an Imagist poet.

Each of the following poets anticipated Modernism with their work: Emily Dickinson, with her experimental punctuation and brevity; Walt Whitman, with his revolutionary portrayals of identity and sexuality and his eschewal of strict meter; Robert Frost, with his clear, precise language and his crisp imagery; and Arthur Rimbaud, for his refusal to romanticize and his use of prose poetry. Poe, however, was a Gothic writer and not a proto-Modernist.

Given that this is Adrienne Rich’s penultimate poetry collection, it makes sense that it would have been published near the end of Rich’s life (1929-2012). Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth was published in 2007.

This collection was first published in 1957.

In addition to Helen in Egypt, H.D. wrote the poetry collections Sea Garden (1916), Hymen (1921), Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), and Red Roses for Bronze (1932). Sword Blades and Poppy Seed is a 1914 collection by the Imagist poet Amy Lowell.

Helen in Egypt (1961) was H.D's last book of poetry.