This is Arthur Rimbaud’s 1871 poem “Le Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). Comprising 25 alexandrine quatrains, the poem is one of Rimbaud’s best-known works and includes vivid sensory details narrated from the point of view of the boat itself.

Czesław Miłosz is known first and foremost to critics as a Polish writer and spent World War II in Warsaw, although he has notably refused to identify either as a Lithuanian or as a Pole. He has won a number of prizes from other nations, though, including the Prix Littéraire Européen and the U.S. National Medal of Arts.

Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he wrote under his pen name (and later formally adopted it) because his working-class parents disapproved of his poetry. He based the pen name on the Czech Realist poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891) and the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). The rest of the names listed here are real (albeit more obscure) Latin American writers.

This is the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, an important post-colonial writer and 1992 Nobel Prize laureate, is the author of Omeros (1990). In addition to poetry, Walcott writes plays and essays and has received an Obie Award, a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and a T.S. Eliot Prize. He is also a painter.

Omeros (1990) is a contemporary Caribbean re-envisioning Homer’s Iliad. Omeros is set in modern-day St. Lucia but includes contemporary versions of Iliad characters such as Achilles and Hector (fishermen in this work), Philoctete and Helen, and a blind seer. It also includes characters that are not taken from Homer, such as Sergeant Major Plunkett.

John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), Virgil's The Aeneid, and Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy (1472) were all used as alternative answer choices.

Walcott's Omeros (1990) is a contemporary epic, spanning several hundred pages and divided into seven “books” and more than 60 chapters. In this way it echoes its inspiration, The Iliad, which is also an epic poem.

Derek Walcott was born in the same place that he sets Omeros (1990): St. Lucia.

This is the Nobel Prize-winning Eastern European poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004). In addition to Unattainable Earth (1984), he is also known for his collections City Without a Name (1969), Native Realm (1959), and Road-side Dog (1997) as well as for a famous anti-Stalin nonfiction work, The Captive Mind (1953).

Along with poet Robert Pinksy, Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass (1941-present) is known for his translations of Miłosz’s works, including Provinces (1991), Facing the River (1995), The Separate Notebooks (1984), and Road-Side Dog (1997).

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014), and Stanisław Barańczak (1946-2014) were all 20^th-century Polish writers. Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) was also a Polish poet, but he lived and wrote during the Renaissance.