Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #432

Text 1 Literary critic Arthur P. Mudge argues that poet Eliza Harwood’s final collection, *The Weeping Sun*, represents a dramatic, unheralded stylistic rupture from her earlier, rigidly structured sonnets. Mudge asserts that the sudden death of Harwood’s brother in 1894 fundamentally shattered her faith in an ordered universe, directly precipitating the chaotic, free-verse experimentation that characterizes her late poems. Text 2 While the biographical impact of profound grief on Eliza Harwood is undeniably evident in her late work's somber tone, attributing her stylistic evolution solely to personal tragedy ignores her extensive private correspondence from 1891 to 1893. In these letters, Harwood expresses mounting frustration with the constraints of traditional meter and openly discusses her theoretical desire to pioneer a "formless poetry" that could better capture the fluidity of human consciousness. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to Mudge’s central claim in Text 1 regarding Harwood's stylistic shift?