Poetry Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the fourteen-line lyric poem, usually in iambic pentameter, that comes in two main patterns: an eight-line section answered by a six-line section with a turn between them, or three four-line sections capped by a rhymed pair of lines?

Question 2

Which Chilean poet and diplomat, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, became famous at nineteen for a book of twenty love poems and a song of despair, later wrote a vast history of the Americas in verse, and published simple odes to a tomato, a pair of socks and an artichoke?

Question 3

Which 13th-century Persian-language mystic, born in what is now Afghanistan and settled in Konya in Anatolia, poured out tens of thousands of verses of ecstatic spiritual love after his life was transformed, and shattered, by his friendship with a wandering holy man called Shams?

Question 4

Which short 1818 poem, written in a friendly competition with another writer on the same subject, reports a traveller's account of two vast stone legs standing in a desert, with a shattered sculpted face half-sunk in the sand nearby, and a boastful inscription on the pedestal?

Question 5

Which Mesopotamian poem, the oldest surviving work of epic literature, was recorded in wedge-shaped script on clay tablets more than a thousand years before Homer and pieced back together by scholars from fragments dug up in the 19th century?

Question 6

Which 1915 poem, written by a Canadian army doctor after burying a friend at the front, speaks in the voice of the war dead lying beneath rows of crosses where poppies grow and larks still sing, and asks the living to take up their quarrel with the foe?

Question 7

Which book of poems, first self-published in 1855 as a thin volume of twelve untitled pieces and expanded and rearranged by its author for the rest of his life, opens with a sprawling free-verse poem in which he celebrates himself and claims to contain multitudes?

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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.