A major modernist poet, T. S. Eliot was also a highly influential critic and essayist. In his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent," Eliot rejected the inspired individualism of romantic poets like William Wordsworth in favor of a view of the poet as one who uses tradition to lift him beyond his personal experience.

Passage adapted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Elliot, 1-11 (1915)

The poem is Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” a lyrical poem in which Dickinson personifies Death as he takes the speaker to her grave.

“The Song of Hiawatha” is one of Longfellow’s best known poems. Published in 1855 and written in trochaic tetrameter, it is an epic that follows the life and adventures of Hiawatha, a Native-American hero.

This poem was written by Stephen Crane. It was published in 1895, as part of his poetry collection The Black Riders and Other Lines. Historically, Crane’s poetry has received less attention than his prose, among which is the famous American novel The Red Badge of Courage, but this particular poem is often discussed among scholars and has served as the epigraph to several later works of fiction.

“Thanatopsis” was published in 1817 by the early American poet, William Cullen Bryant. As its Greek title indicates, the poem is an extended meditation on death (Thantos = "death" in Greek).

This poem is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells.” Known also for his short fiction, much of which has a macabre tone and a preoccupation with human mortality, Poe wrote “The Bells” with the aid of literary devices such as onomatopoeia, metaphor, and diacope. It was published posthumously.

Ralph Waldo Emerson may be best known for his critical work, including “Self-Reliance” and various discussions of Transcendentalism, but it is important to recognize his poetry as well. “Concord Hymn,” published in 1836, is one of his best known poems and was sung at the dedication for a monument commemorating the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Concord.

This is Stephen Crane’s poem “In the Desert,” taken from his collection of 56 poems titled The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895). The Black Riders and Other Lines was Crane's second book, and was published earlier in the same year as Crane's most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

Even if you weren’t sure when this poem was published, 1895, you could rule out the other choices. Stephen Crane lived a short life, dying in 1900 at the age of 29. All of the five books Crane published in his lifetime were released in the six year period between 1893 and 1899.

The passage is adapted from "In the Desert," which appeared in Stephen Crane's The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895).

Stephen Crane published the novel The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, the same year in which The Black Riders and Other Lines, his only volume of poetry, was published. He was said to prefer The Black Riders and Other Lines to this novel, although the latter was vastly more famous.

The passage is adapted from "In the Desert," which appeared in Stephen Crane's The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895). Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1958) were all used as alternative options.