Poetry Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What name is given to the loose movement of British poets around 1790 to 1830, who exalted feeling, imagination, the natural world and the individual over the reason and polish prized by the previous century?

Question 2

Which 17th-century Japanese poet, the acknowledged master of the seventeen-syllable form, gave up a comfortable life to travel the country on foot and wrote a celebrated account of a long journey into the northern interior, mixing prose passages with the short poems they prompted?

Question 3

Which unfinished English poem of the late 14th century frames a story collection as a spring pilgrimage from a London inn to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Kent, with the host proposing that each traveller spin a few yarns on the road to pass the time and win a free supper?

Question 4

Which poem of about 1895, cast as a father's advice to his son and built as one long sentence of conditions, promises that if the boy can keep his head, trust himself, treat triumph and disaster alike, and fill the unforgiving minute, then he will be a man?

Question 5

Which novel in verse, published in parts through the 1820s and 30s and regarded as the foundation stone of its national literature, follows a bored young aristocrat who coldly rejects a shy country girl's love letter, kills his best friend in a needless duel, and years later is himself rejected by the same woman, now a grand married lady?

Question 6

Which short Romantic poem, often known by the name of the flowers it describes, recalls the poet coming suddenly upon a huge crowd of them fluttering and dancing in the breeze beside a lake, and finding that the memory later flashes upon his inward eye?

Question 7

Which archaic Greek lyric poet, who lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC and was later called the tenth Muse, wrote intense personal songs of desire and jealousy, most of which survive only as short quotations and torn scraps of papyrus?

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About Poetry

This quiz is about poetry: the poems everyone half-knows, the poets behind them, the verse forms and techniques, the movements, and the handful of lines that have escaped into everyday speech. Eighty questions, each describing a poem, a poet by their work, a form, a device, a movement or a poetic office, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-famous material is used.

The first pack is the core: the epics of Homer, Dante, Milton and Chaucer; The Waste Land; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; The Raven; Ozymandias; The Road Not Taken; Leaves of Grass; and the basic forms, the sonnet, the haiku, the limerick, the ode, the elegy, the epic, free verse and the villanelle.

The second pack widens the field: Prufrock, Kubla Khan, the daffodils, the Light Brigade, Jabberwocky, If, The Second Coming, Howl, the Dickinson and Frost lyrics, The Tyger, O Captain My Captain, My Last Duchess, To His Coy Mistress, Invictus, The New Colossus, In Flanders Fields, the Aeneid, the Rubaiyat, Beowulf and The Faerie Queene; the world poets Rilke, Neruda, Rumi, Lorca, Akhmatova, Sappho, Li Bai, Goethe and Baudelaire; and the ballad, the volta, enjambment, the dramatic monologue, the Poet Laureate, and the Romantic and Metaphysical schools.

The third pack covers the Keats and Wordsworth long poems, Yeats and Shelley odes, Gray's Elegy, Pope's mock-epic, the Sanskrit Mahabharata and Ramayana, Gilgamesh, The Song of Roland and Pound's Cantos; the sestina, the ghazal, concrete poetry, the heroic couplet and spoken-word poetry; and the poets Basho, Heaney, Wallace Stevens and Maya Angelou, each drawn by their writing rather than their biography.

The wrong answers are always other poems, poets or forms of the same kind, so a shaky guess is easily caught and a sure one quickly confirmed. Because every option is the same sort of thing, a neutral picture, a shelf of old books, a library, a quill and inkwell, an old typewriter, is equally consistent with all four and cannot point to any one of them, so about fifteen questions carry one for atmosphere.

No specialist training is needed. The quiz rewards the poems people meet at school, hear quoted at weddings and funerals, or run into as the source of a familiar phrase, and it uses the explanations to connect them to the forms they are written in and the movements they belong to. It ranges well beyond English: the Greek and Roman and Sanskrit epics, Persian and Japanese and Chinese classics, and the major modern voices of Europe and the Americas all appear. Quotations, dates and attributions have been checked against standard editions and reference works.