In addition to The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1923)and Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables (1958), Loy wrote Songs to Joannes, a collection of frank, experimental love poetry,in 1915. Tender Buttons (1914) is by Gertrude Stein, Nightwood (1936) is by Djuna Barnes, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1990) is by Adrienne Rich, and Crossing the Water (1971) is by Sylvia Plath.

The Whitsun Weddings (1964) is Philip Larkin’s 8th book, and it contains such well-known poems as the title poem, “MCMXIV,” and “An Arundel Tomb.”

The Sea and the Mirror is a 1958 poetry collection by W.H. Auden. Jill (1946), High Windows (1974), The Less Deceived (1955), and All What Jazz (1970) are all by the prolific Philip Larkin.

A medieval Sussex tomb is the subject of the poem “An Arundel Tomb,” renting a room is the subject of “Mr. Bleaney,” volunteer enlistment and slaughter is the subject of “MCMXIV,” and a train journey is the subject of “The Whitsun Weddings” – all of which are poems included in Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. The United Irishmen rebellion is the subject of “Requiem for the Croppies,” (1966) a famous poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Birthday Letters (1998) is British poet laureate Ted Hughes’ last collection of poetry, and it’s also one of his most famous.

In Birthday Letters (1998), Hughes examines the suicide of his first wife, American poet Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Plath were married in 1956, and Plath died in 1963.

This poem is an elegy for the Romantic poet John Keats, who died at age 26 of tuberculosis.  Keats was one of the leading figures of the second generation of Romatic poets.

Passage adapted from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley, I.1-9 (1821)

Dublin's Abbey Theatre opened in 1904 and is closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival. Key figures associated with the theatre include John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey, but the actual founders were W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory.

Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" is a retelling of a Greek myth in which a Greek queen named Leda is raped by the god Zeus, who has taken the form of a swan. After the rape, Leda produces four offspring, two of whom are the children of Zeus and two of whom are the children of her husband. In the traditional myth, one of the offspring not fathered by Zeus is Agamemnon's future wife Clytemnestra, who later conspires with her lover Aegisthus to kill her husband.

The poem was originally published in 1712, and revised versions were released in 1714 and 1717. Even if you didn’t know this, you could rule out the other decades because none of them fall within Pope’s lifetime (1688-1744).

Passage adapted from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, I.1-12 (1712; ed. 1906)