Poetry

Question 1

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, what is the name of the distraught narrator’s lost love? The ominous bird of yore, perched above the chamber door, eyes burned into his bosom’s core, though he truly does implore, by the God they both adore, says he will see her nevermore.

Answer 1

Lenore

Question 2

Good morning, daddy!/Ain’t you heard/The boogie-woogie rumble/Of a dream deferred? This kicks off a 1951 long poem by what American writer?

Answer 2

Langston Hughes

Question 3

A meditation on the state of life and England and what it could potentially become, the William Blake poem known by its opening line “And did those feet in ancient time” references the grandeur of what Middle Eastern location? The poem would be set to music by Sir Hubert Parry and become a popular anthem in 1916.

Answer 3

Jerusalem

Question 4

What French painter wrote an 1889 sonnet that begins, “One knows that in your world / Queens are made of distance and grease paint”?

Answer 4

Edgar Degas

Question 5

“One fine day in the middle of the night, Two dead boys got up to fight.” What are the next two lines of this nonsense verse?

Answer 5

“Back-to-back they faced one another, Drew their swords and shot each other.”

Question 6

This Scot’s beloved poems include “To A Mouse” and “Address to a Haggis.”

Answer 6

Robert Burns

Question 7

In his poem “Tithonus,” Tennyson wrote that what animal dies “after many a summer”?

Answer 7

Swan

Question 8

Awarded by Yale, this poetry prize was established by an admirer of Carl Jung, who named it for Jung’s home in Switzerland.

Answer 8

Bollingen Prize

Question 9

Among the most famous works of English poet John Keats are a set of six odes composed in 1819. They are odes on a Grecian Urn, on Indolence, on Melancholy, to Psyche, to Autumn, and to what bird?

Answer 9

Nightingale

Question 10

Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered Sodium.

This verse is an example of a form known as what, after its inventor Edmund C. Bentley (who wrote the above)?

Answer 10

Clerihew

Question 11

She began a poem, “Because I could not stop for death– he kindly stopped for me”

Answer 11

Emily Dickinson

Question 12

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “On the Death of” this poet mentions “that Harold’s pilgrimage at last is o’er.”

Answer 12

Lord Byron

Question 13

Often compared to another New England poet Maxine Kumin was dubbed this, the female equivalent of his name.

Answer 13

Roberta Frost

Question 14

Known for her confessional poetry, she won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for “Stag’s Leap”, a book of poems about her divorce.

Answer 14

Sharon Olds

Question 15

Whitman said this man’s poetry has a “propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page”

Answer 15

Edgar Allen Poe

Question 16

The first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1968 she was named Poet Laureate of Illinois.

Answer 16

Gwendolyn Brooks

Question 17

What two words are missing from the following title of a Walt Whitman poem, which was untitled in 1855’s Leaves of Grass and later appeared as “Poem of the Body” before acquiring this present title (which is also now the poem’s first line): I _______ the Body _______.

Answer 17

Sing, Electric

Question 18

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…” So begins the first stanza of what poem?

Answer 18

The Raven

Question 19

What 1888 poem is set in the town of Mudville?

Answer 19

Casey at the Bat

Question 20

What writer, born in 1883 in modern-day Lebanon, is the second best-selling poet of all time, after Shakespeare?

Answer 20

Kahlil Gibran, best known for The Prophet. All-time sales rankings of poets often put Lao-Tzu in second place, ahead of Gibran, but that’s stretching the meaning of “poet” pretty damn far.

Question 21

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here” is a line from this 14th century poem.

Answer 21

The Divine Comedy

Question 22

This American poet and author is best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861.

Answer 22

Julia Ward Howe

Question 23

The collection of poems from 1912 titled Gitanjali (Song Offerings), based on medieval lyrics of devotion, led directly to its author’s Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. Name this Bengali poet, who was the first non-European to win that award.

Answer 23

Rabindranath Tagore

Question 24

Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a combination of prose and haiku written in the late 17th century, is a masterpiece of Japanese literature by what poet?

Answer 24

Matsuo Basho

Question 25

Despite this poet’s name, he holds with “those who favor fire” for how “the world will end.”

Answer 25

Robert Frost

Question 26

The title of the classic 8th-century Japanese poetry anthology Man’yōshū is often translated into English as the Collection of 10,000 what? The word in question is used in another, unrelated poetry collection from the 19th century. which translates to Japanese as Kusa no ha (草の葉).

Answer 26

Leaves

Question 27

Probably published without permission (and certainly without attribution), I taste a liquor never brewed and A narrow Fellow in the Grass are titles given to two of the fewer than a dozen of what poet’s works published during her lifetime?

Answer 27

Emily Dickinson

Question 28

In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation “Darmok”, Captain Picard makes reference to an early poem while trying to find a frame of cultural reference through which to communicate with a new alien species. What is this poem, in which the eponymous hero must befriend Enkidu and slay the Bull of Heaven?

Answer 28

Epic of Gilgamesh

Question 29

A talking corvid in Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty inspired a famous 1845 poem by whom?

Answer 29

Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven)

Question 30

Among the many notable elements in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is its internal rhyme, which starts in its first line. The 16-syllable line fittingly begins “Once upon” and rhymes what two words?

Answer 30

Dreary, Weary

Question 31

What literary term, from Greek and a diminutive of “picture” or “form”, is used for a typically short poem or prose with a pastoral theme that evokes a mood of tranquility and peace, often expressing a scene of country life or rustic charm? This word is arguably more common in English in adjective form.

Answer 31

Idyll