In this survey course, five poems ranked as classics in Western literature will be examined for their style and messaging. Each poem—Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Whitman’s Song of Myself, TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety—emerges from a critical period in Italian, English, or American cultural history, during a time when individuals confronted shifting norms and roles in a rapidly changing world. Parallels will be drawn to music contemporaneous with the works—from late medieval to modern—as we consider the “soundtracks” that may have played into the poets’ imagination.