This is Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, one of three books in epic poem The Divine Comedy. Dante’s masterpiece, which was written in the fourteenth century, includes several main characters: Beatrice, who is Dante’s muse; Virgil, who guides the narrator on his journey through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; and the narrator himself, who embarks on an allegorical/metaphysical journey from sinfulness to God.

Passage adapted from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri l.67-75 (trans. Longfellow 1867)

This is the opening of Homer’s Iliad, a poem written in dactylic hexameter and set during the ten-year Trojan War. The poem centers on the battles and events that arise from a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles and includes the characters Patroclus, Odysseus, Helen, Hector, Paris, and Menelaus. Written around the 1100s BCE, the poem is known for beginning in media res.

Passage adapted from The Iliad by Homer, l.1-8 (trans. Pope 1715)

This excerpt is identifiable as Homer’s Odyssey because of the characters mentioned: Ulysses (Odysseus), a Greek hero who fought in the Trojan War and is on a ten-year journey to return home to his native Ithaca; Circe, an enchantress and Ulysses’ lover; and Calypso, a beautiful nymph who falls in love with and imprisons Ulysses. Other characters in this epic poem, which was written around the same time as the Iliad, are Penelope, Telemachus, Polyphemus, Scylla, Charybdis, Zeus, and Tiresias.

Passage adapted from The Odyssey, l.547-556 (trans. Cowper 1791)

This is Kamau Brathwaite, a Barbados-born poet and author of critical works such as History of the Voice and The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica.

This is the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who is also known for his nonfiction book denouncing Stalin titled The Captive Mind. Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980.

This is the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991.

Sea Grapes is a 1976 poetry collection by Derek Walcott.

This is the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, an important post-colonial writer. Omeros was published in 1990 and contains characters with mythical names such as Achille, Hector, and Helen, although the work itself is set primarily in modern-day St. Lucia.

This is the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, an important founder of négritude in French-language literature. Césaire’s work also includes plays such as A Tempest (based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and critical essays such as Discourse on Colonialism. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land was first published in 1939 in France.

All of these terms except “gendai-shi” refer to older, more traditional forms of Japanese poetry.