Heritage by Countee Cullen was first collected in his first volume of poems Color which is regarded as the landmark for the Harlem Renaissance. This famous poem is also considered as the Black Waste Land because it is also about the confusion of the identity that Eliot, in his The Waste Land had dealt with modern people who, despite being aware of his own rich root are wandering around in the barren and conformist culture.
Not Waving but Drowning is one of the most appreciated poem of Stevie Smith which was chosen as the fourth favorite poem in England in 1995. Her trademark of moving from comic to tragic and from the simplicity to the darker theme of life is vividly projected in this short poem.
Allen Tate, an American poet and critic, aims to revitalize the southern values in his moat acknowledged poem Ode to the Confederate Dead. This long poem is a subtype of graveyard poetry where he tries to re-energies the southern values along with the memory of the dead soldiers.
In the title of the poem, time juxtaposes with setting in order to create a painful discernment of life and death. In this short free-verse poem of twenty-six lines, the bewilderment of an ordinary soldier confronting the harshness of existence in the trenches during World War I is projected. It is also a contemplation on life in the midst of war.
Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter is written by famous poet and New Critic John Crowe Ransom in an elegy form lamenting the death of a lively small girl of his neighborhood.
Glory of Women by anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon is in fact the starting of the anti-women literature in the field of English literature. This sonnet is sarcastic in theme and in the structure as the title indicates the praise of the women, but the poem condemns women for making the bloody and destructive war a matter of pride to talk about.
In a Station of the Metro published in 1913 by Ezra Pound is the best example of Imagist poetry that contains just 14 words reduced from thirty lines which depict the precision of language. This poem is one of the verb-less poem among the very few.
Patterns by Amy Lowell published in 1915 was one of the best known Imagist poems. Lowell beautifully and vividly created pictures with the words and presents the view of the woman towards the war and on the social conventions. The lady in the poem has just heard the death of her would be husband in the war, which had brought her the gloom of the separation before the union.
The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew is a dramatic monologue where a husband who is a farmer by profession narrates his unhappy marital relationship with his wife. This poem ends with a sad, but a strong feeling of lust of a desperate husband.
Paul Laurence Dunbar through this lyric poem highlight the suffering of the oppressed by prejudice and unfair laws with the use of the analogy of caged bird. This poem is written in three stanzas containing seven lines each.