hard · GRE Verbal

Passage: The poet's late work has often been dismissed as a falling-off, its abandonment of the tight metrical forms of her youth read as a failure of craft. But to measure the later poems by the standards of the earlier is to miss what she was attempting. The loosened line, the unresolved cadence, the deliberate withholding of closure—these are not lapses but instruments, tuned to render a consciousness that had ceased to believe the world could be made to rhyme. Her formal 'decline' is better seen as a hard-won correspondence between manner and matter: a style that enacts, rather than merely describes, the disintegration it contemplates. The author's attitude toward the poet's late work is best described as:

1. Appreciative of a formal strategy that critics have misjudged
2. Nostalgic for the disciplined forms of the poet's early period
3. Neutral in cataloging the technical features of the later poems
4. Dismissive of the later poems as evidence of waning skill
5. Uncertain whether the later poems represent progress or decline

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