Pairing Up

First things first. We use the Pairing Strategy to identify any synonym pairs among the six answer choices. There are usually two, sometimes one, sometimes three. We call the "triple pair" the Great White Buffalo.

Pair 1: craft/cunning
Pair 2: innocence/naïveté

The words astonishment and vexation are NOT a pair, so we cross them out: ~~astonishment~~ and ~~vexation~~.

The Right Answer

Use Math Strategy here. The phrase "in fact" indicates that there is a contrast between two ideas in the sentence. The contrast is between the critics' perceptions of Emily Dickinson's poetry and the reality of the situation. These critics perceived Emily Dickinson as "artless," which means unskilled. The contrast of that is "skilled."

The best match for this guess is the pair craft/cunning.

The Wrong Answer

innocence/naïveté: We have no evidence whether Emily Dickinson was "innocent" or "not innocent." Also, it doesn't really make sense to "construct" something with "innocence."