This poem is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a modernist classic. The poem represented an important shift from older forms of verse to a looser, more imagistic modern form. Eliot, who lived from 1888 to 1965, is one of the best-known British poets of his times, although he was actually born in America. He is known for his critical work such as the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his plays, and his frequently anthologized poems, including “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Four Quartets.” He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Line adapted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot, l.1 (1920)

Although Sassoon is one of the best known poets of the First World War, the poet in question is actually Ford Madox Ford, who was a novelist as well as an editor and a critic. Among Ford’s volumes of poetry is one he wrote as a soldier during the war: On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service.

The poet described is Mina Loy. Djuna Barnes was the American-born poet, playwright, and fiction writer who wrote Nightwood; Gertrude Stein was the American-born poet and visual artist who hosted famous salons in Paris; Virginia Woolf was an English essayist and novelist who wrote such classics as the essay A Room of One’s Own and the novel Mrs. Dalloway; and Marie Laurencin was a French poet, printmaker, and painter who was often identified as Guillaume Apollinaire’s muse.

This poet is W. H. Auden, who wrote everything from limericks and haikus to ballads and villanelles. His work examined romantic relationships, politics, nature, religion, art, and ethics. He lived from 1907 to 1973.

Heaney, born in Northern Ireland in 1939, published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and wrote or edited many more critical works, anthologies, and translations. He is considered one of Ireland’s greatest poets.

This poet is William Butler Yeats, who, along with Seamus Heaney, is one of Ireland’s best known poets. Born in Dublin in 1865, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and was a major figure in the Irish Literary Revival movement. His work was preoccupied with themes of Irish mythology and transcendentalism, and the poems mentioned above are two of his most famous.

Born in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes became England's Poet Laureate in 1984 and was a translator and children’s book author in addition to a poet and a critic. Hughes is also known for co-editing the 1982 Rattle Bag and 1997 School Bag anthologies with Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

The poet described is Philip Larkin, who was born in Coventry in 1922. His poetry is distinguished by a cynical, forthright treatment of romance, children, sexuality, politics, and daily life.

Britain’s current (2015) Poet Laureate is Carol Ann Duffy, a writer whose work is often rooted in fantasy, fairy tales, and feminism.

Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was known for publishing nearly two dozen detective novels in addition to many collections of poetry. These poetry volumes include titles such as From Feathers to Iron, Pegasus and Other Poems, and The Whispering Roots and Other Poems. Day-Lewis’s style was often conflicted—at times lyrical or romantic, at times aggressively Marxist.