Romantic Poetry & Victorian Poetry

Question 1

Who worked as an engraver?

Answer 1

William Blake

Question 2

Who said Blake had visions?

Answer 2

Henry Crabb
, he saw the God’s head appear in a window, a little later he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree, and also a tree filled with angels.

Question 3

Catherine Boucher married?

Answer 3

William Blake
He He taught her how to read and write and also how to draw, colour and design. She helped him in printing his books in their own printing press.

Question 4

Blake was inspired from?

Answer 4

Emanuel Swedenborg

Question 5

‘One power only makes a poet: Imagination, The Divine Vision.’ He believed that one should go beyond the realm of the ‘Natural’ Who said this?

Answer 5

William Blake

Question 6

William Blake poems?

Answer 6

• “Poetic Sketches (1783) in which the influence of the form and manner of Shakespeare, Milton, or Spenser can be seen.
• Tiriel(1783)
• Songs of Innocence (1789)
• The Book of Thel(1789-91)

Question 7

• “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” was published in?

Answer 7

1793

Question 8

Who illustrated the first copy of Songs of Innocence

Answer 8

Blake himself in 1789

Question 9

Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul was published in?

Answer 9

1794

Question 10

•	Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb."
So I piped with merry cheer;
"Piper, pipe that song again."
So I piped; he wept to hear.

Thiese are lines from?

Answer 10

Songs of Inncence

Question 11

• When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.

Lines from

Answer 11

Nurse’s Song st 1

Question 12

• But most, thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Lines from

Answer 12

London

Question 13

• Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.

Lines from

Answer 13

A Divine Image by Blake

Question 14

Some poems by Blake?

Answer 14

America, a Prophecy(1794)
Europe, A Prophecy(1794)
The Book of Urizen(1794)
The Song of Los (1795)
The Book of Ahania (1795)
Vala or The Four Zoas(1796-1807)
Milton(1804-1815)
Jerusalem(1804-1820)

Question 15

Wordsworth was British Poet Laureate till?

Answer 15

1843 till 1850

Question 16

Prelude was written in?

Answer 16

• Book 1 and 2 were written in 1799, and then it was kept aside till 1805 and then throughout his life he kept revising it till his death and publication in 1850.
• The title given by Mary Wordsworth. Wordsworth never gave it any name, it was called ‘the poem to Coleridge’ or ‘the poem on his own early life’, or he himself called it, ‘an unpublished Poem on the Growth and Revolutions of an Individual Minds.’.

Question 17

Wht are 14 sections of Prelude?

Answer 17

1. Introduction – Childhood and School-Time
2. School-Time (Continued)
3. Residence at Cambridge
4. Summer Vacation
5. Books
6. Cambridge and the Alps
7. Residence in London
8. Retrospect – Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man
9. Residence in France
10. Residence in France (Continued)
11. Residence in France (Concluded)
12. Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored
13. Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored (Concluded)
14. Conclusion

Question 18

Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

These are lines from?

Answer 18

Book 1

Prelude

Question 19

the first publication of poems by Wordsworth?

Answer 19

1793

“An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches”.

Question 20

Wordsworth met Coleridge in?

Answer 20

1795 in Somerset

Question 21

Wordsworth moved to his sister to?

Answer 21

Racedown in Dorset with Dorothy

Question 22

Wordsworth wrote Prelude in?

Answer 22

Gosler

Question 23

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are called?

Answer 23

Lake Poets

Question 24

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. was published in?

Answer 24

1807

Question 25

Lucy poems were written in?

Answer 25

Hamburg, Germany between October 1798 to April 1801

Question 26

“A slumber did my spirit seal” was published in?

Answer 26

1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads

Question 27

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways” is about?

Answer 27

Lucy lives in solitude near River Dove.

simple language, mainly words of one syllable.
In the opening quatrain: isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived,
Second: her innocence, her beauty = hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucy’s early and lonesome death, which only he notices.

Question 28

The Excursion was published in?

Answer 28

1814

Question 29

Tintern Abbey is about?

Answer 29

restoration”. He recognises in the landscape something which had been so internalised as to become the basis for out of the body experience.
• He realises the power such scenery has continued to have upon him, even when not physically present there.
He identifies in it “a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns”. With this insight he finds in nature “The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being”.
• The third movement: his vision and in the conviction that “all which we behold is full of blessings”. It is this that will continue to create a lasting bond between them.

Question 30

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in?

Answer 30

1798

Question 31

Which poem was inspired by James Cook’s second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) of the South Seas and the Pacific Ocean;

Answer 31

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Question 32

•	Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

These lines are from?

Answer 32

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Question 33

What is the subtitle of Kubla Khan

Answer 33

A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment written in 1797 and published in 1816

Question 34

Poems by Shelley?

Answer 34

• “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “To a Skylark”, “Music, When Soft Voices Die”, “The Cloud”, and “The Masque of Anarchy”.

Question 35

Ode to the West Wind was written in?

Answer 35

1819 near Florence

Published in 1820 in Prometheus Unbound

Question 36

Summary of Ode to the West Wind?

Answer 36

3 sections: wind’s effects upon earth, air, and ocean.
In the last two sections, the poet speaks directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him up and make him its companion in its wanderings.
The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far.
• Loss of son, William (born to Mary Shelley) in 1819.
Allegory to the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution.
At the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind.
His other poems written at the same time—”The Masque of Anarchy”.
• It consists of five sections (cantos) written in terza rima. Each section consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter.

Question 37

The Cloud is a lyrical drama by?

Answer 37

Shelley
in 1819
published in 1820 in Prometheus Unbound

Question 38

To the Skylark

Answer 38

inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley,

The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a “blithe Spirit” rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”.

• The skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its “shrill delight,” which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the “white dawn,” which can be felt even when they are not seen.
The earth and air ring with the skylark’s voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind “a lonely cloud.”

• Skylark is unique. It is like a golden glow-worm, scattering light among the flowers and grass in which it is hidden. The skylark’s song surpasses “all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh,” whether the rain falling on the “twinkling grass” or the flowers the rain awakens.
• The Skylark is “Sprite or Bird,” the speaker asks it to tell him its “sweet thoughts,” for he has never heard anyone or anything call up “a flood of rapture so divine.” Compared to the skylark’s, any music would seem lacking.
Nothing gives more happiness. Pain and languor, the speaker says, “never came near” the skylark. Of death, the skylark must know “things more true and deep” than mortals could dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, “how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? Calling the bird a “scorner of the ground,” he says that its music is better than all music and all poetry.
•

Question 39

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Lines from?

Answer 39

To the Skylark

Question 40

Adonis is about?

Answer 40

John Keat (1821) after his death

He calls on Urania to mourn for Keats who died in Rome
The poet summons the subject matter of Keats’ poetry to weep for him.
comes and mourns at his bidding.
Nature, celebrated by Keats in his poetry, mourns him.
Spring, which brings nature to new life, cannot restore him Fellow poets mourn the death of Keats:
Byron, Thomas Moore, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt. Critics of Quarterly Review are blamed for his death.
The poet urges the mourners not to weep any longer.

Keats has become a portion of the eternal and is free from the attacks of reviewers. He is not dead; it is the living who are dead.
He is with the unchanging Spirit, Intellectual Beauty, or Love in heaven.

• The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

Question 41

Don Juan is about?

Answer 41

the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form.

Question 42

Summary of Don Juan

Answer 42

• birth of Don Juan, precocious sexually,
affair with a friend of his mother.
The husband finds out, and Don Juan is sent away to Cádiz.
shipwrecked, survives and meets the daughter of a pirate, sold as a slave.

A young woman, who is a member of a sultan’s harem, sees that this slave is purchased.
She disguises him as a girl and sneaks him into her chambers.
Don Juan escapes, joins the Russian army and rescues a Muslim girl named Leila.
Don Juan meets Catherine the Great, who asks him to join her court. Don Juan becomes sick, is sent to England, where he finds someone to watch over Leila. Next, a few adventures involving the aristocracy of Britain ensue.
• “A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented.”
―Don Juan: Cantos 1 Through 3

Question 43

Poems by Lord Byron?

Answer 43

The Giaour (1813) Melodramatic verse tales.
The Bride of Abydos (1813)
The Corsair (1814)  
Lara, A Tale (1814)  
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
The Siege of Corinth (1816)  
Parisina (1816)  
The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)  
The Dream (1816)

Question 44

Child Herold is a poem by?

Answer 44

(1818) is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to “Ianthe”,

Question 45

What is Child Herold about?

Answer 45

travels and reflections of a world-weary young man,
disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands.
expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

Question 46

Endymion is a poem by?

Answer 46

John Keats

Question 47

About Endymion?

Answer 47

first published in 1818 by Taylor and Hessey of Fleet Street in London
• Endymion is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (also known as heroic couplets). Keats based the poem on the Greek myth of Endymion,
the shepherd beloved of the moon goddess Selene.

The poem elaborates on the original story and renames Selene “Cynthia” (an alternative name for Artemis).
• The poem is divided into four books, each approximately 1000 lines long.

Question 48

Books in Endimion

Answer 48

Book I his dreams and experiences, as related to Peona, which provides the background for the rest of the poem.

Book 2: underworld in search of his love.
He encounters Adonis and Venus
Book 3 reveals Endymion’s enduring love, and he begs the Moon not to torment him any longer as he journeys through a watery void on the sea floor.

There he meets Glaucus, freeing the god from a thousand years of imprisonment by the witch Circe.

Book 4: falls in love with a beautiful Indian maiden. Both ride winged black steeds to Mount Olympus where Cynthia awaits, only for Endymion to forsake the goddess for his new, mortal, love. Endymion and the Indian girl return to earth, the latter saying she cannot be his love.

Question 49

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
 Lines from?

Answer 49

Endymion

Question 50

How many Stanzas does Eve of St. Agnes has?

Answer 50

42 Spenserian stanzas

written in 1819, published in 1820.

Question 51

The Fall of Hyperion has its subtitle?

Answer 51

A Dream

sometimes it is called A Vision

Question 52

Summary of Fall of Hyperion?

Answer 52

• The poem’s first scene opens with the poet narrator stumbling on a post-Edenic feast scene. This scene is reminiscent of the “sensory delight” mentioned in his previous work, Sleep and Poetry, or of the “happy happy joy” experienced in Ode on a Grecian Urn. After enjoying the sensory delight, he is compelled to partake of a “cool vessel of transparent juice” that causes him to fall into a deep sleep.

• At the temple, with the gates to the East (the same direction as the gates of Eden) shut.
Challenged by Moneta, to climb upon stairs, which he experiences a painful death that is reminiscent of Apollo’s pain when “dying into life” in Hyperion.
Upon climbing, the poet narrator must overcome the desire to avoid suffering and dwell in spiritual pleasure in order to transcend the mistakes of false poets.
Once the poet narrator makes it up the steps, he is questioned thoroughly by Moneta on the nature of poetry, on visions, and what one must do with their life, which reflects the second part of Sleep and Poetry, where the narrator has to condemn the false poets in each.
• Once the poet has passed the test, Moneta allows the poet to witness a vision of the Titans and of Hyperion. This scene ends with the image of Hyperion rising, which leads to the beginning of the previous fragment, Hyperion.

Question 53

“To Autumn was composed in?

Answer 53

was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats’s poetry that included Lamia and final work in a group of poems known as Keats’s “1819 odes”. He composed “To Autumn” after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening.

Question 54

Summary of To Autumn

Answer 54

• The poem has three eleven-line stanzas
describe a progression through the season,
from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists, with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting.

Question 55

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in?

Answer 55

it was written in 1819

and published in 1819

Question 56

Summary of Ode on a Grecian Urn?

Answer 56

• Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator’s discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn.
The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a 1. lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment,
2. villagers about to perform a sacrifice.
The final lines of the poem declare that
“‘beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”, and literary critics have debated whether they increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem.
• It uses ekphrasis, the poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in words.

Question 57

Lamia was published in?

Answer 57

in 1820. The poem was written in 1819, during the famously productive period that produced his 1819 odes.

Question 58

What is Lamia about?

Answer 58

• The poem tells how the god Hermes hears of a nymph who is more beautiful than all. Hermes, searching for the nymph, instead comes across Lamia, trapped in the form of a serpent. She reveals the previously invisible nymph to him and in return he restores her human form. She goes to seek a youth of Corinth, Lycius, while Hermes and his nymph depart together into the woods. The relationship between Lycius and Lamia, however, is destroyed when the sage Apollonius reveals Lamia’s true identity at their wedding feast, whereupon she seemingly disappears and Lycius dies of grief

Question 59

as “Break, Break, Break”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Tears, Idle Tears”, and “Crossing the Bar”. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as “Ulysses
were written by?

Answer 59

Tennyson

Question 60

“In Memoriam A.H.H.” or simply “In Memoriam”

Answer 60

1849
It is about the poet’s beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833.

Question 61

What is the original title of the poem In Memoriam?

Answer 61

“The Way of the Soul”,

Question 62

Maud and other poems was published in?

Answer 62

1855

Question 63

Maud was inspired from?

Answer 63

The poem was inspired by Charlotte Rosa Baring, younger daughter of William Baring (1779–1820) and Frances Poulett-Thomson (d. 1877). Frances Baring married, secondly, Arthur Eden (1793–1874)

Question 64

“Ulysses” was published in?

Answer 64

1833 and was published in 1842.

Question 65

Summary of Ulysses?

Answer 65

Facing old age, mythical hero Ulysses describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca, after his far-ranging travels. Despite his reunion with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus, Ulysses yearns to explore again.
• Homer’s narrative in the poem.
Dante’s Ulisse in this.
As the poem begins, Ulysses has returned to his kingdom, Ithaca, having made a long journey home after fighting in the Trojan War. Confronted again by domestic life, Ulysses expresses his lack of contentment, including his indifference toward the “savage race” (line 4) whom he governs.

Question 66

Summary of My Last Duchess?

Answer 66

The poem is set in the Italian Renaissance. The speaker (presumably the Duke of Ferrara) is giving the emissary of the family of his prospective new wife a tour of the artworks in his home. He draws a curtain to reveal a painting of a woman, explaining that it is a portrait of his late wife. As they look at the portrait of the late Duchess, the Duke describes her happy, cheerful and flirtatious nature, which had displeased him. The Duke had given commands to the Duchess to stop smiling or commands for her to be killed. He now keeps her painting hidden behind a curtain that only he is allowed to draw back, meaning that now she only smiles for him.

Question 67

When did Dramatic Personae get Published?

Answer 67

1864

Question 68

about • “Porphyria’s Lover” ?

Answer 68

• In the poem, a man strangles his lover – Porphyria – with her hair; “… and all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around, / And strangled her.”
• Porphyria’s lover then talks of the corpse’s blue eyes, golden hair, and describes the feeling of perfect happiness the murder gives him. Although he winds her hair around her throat three times to throttle her, the woman never cries out. The poem uses a somewhat unusual rhyme scheme: A,B,A,B,B, the final repetition bringing each stanza to a heavy rest.
• A possible source for the poem is John Wilson’s “Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary”, a lurid account of a murder published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1818.

Question 69

“Fra Lippo Lippi” was published in?

Answer 69

1855. dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet Robert Browning which first appeared in his collection Men and Women. Throughout this poem, Browning depicts a 15th-century real-life painter, Filippo Lippi. The poem asks the question whether art should be true to life or an idealized image of life. The poem is written in blank verse, non-rhyming iambic pentameter.

Question 70

Rabbi Ben Ezra is about?

Answer 70

Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167), one of the great poets, mathematicians, and scholars of the 12th century. He wrote on grammar, astronomy, the astrolabe, etc. the poem was published in Browning’s Dramatis Personae in 1864.
• second line of the poem, ‘The Best is Yet to Be’, was adopted as the motto of the Anglo-Chinese Schools of Singapore, a family of schools founded as a Methodist Institution in 1886, and is a well-known, well-endowed education institution in Singapore.

Question 71

An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, is a collection by?

Answer 71

Elizabeth Barret Browning

1826

Question 72

The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point is about?

Answer 72

describes a slave woman who is whipped, raped, and made pregnant as she curses the slavers

Question 73

Scholar Gypsy is based on?

Answer 73

17th-century Oxford story found in Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661)

Question 74

Dover Beach was published in?

Answer 74

is a lyric poem published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849.

Question 75

“Thyrsis” is about?

Answer 75

December 1865 to commemorate his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in November 1861 aged only 42.
• The character, Thyrsis, was a shepherd in Virgil’s Seventh Eclogue, who lost a singing match against Corydon. The implication that Clough was a loser is hardly fair, given that he is thought by many to have been one of the greatest Nineteenth Century poets