Poetry Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

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 2

Which much-loved 1751 poem, set at dusk as a curfew bell tolls and the ploughman plods home, meditates among the graves of ordinary villagers on the unrecorded lives buried there, some of whom might have been a Milton or a Cromwell had circumstances allowed?

Question 3

What name, coined dismissively by Dr Johnson more than a century afterwards, is given to a group of 17th-century English poets, headed by John Donne and including George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, known for yoking wildly unlike ideas together in elaborate extended comparisons?

Question 4

Which French poet published a single, career-defining collection in 1857 whose title translates as the flowers of evil, and was promptly prosecuted along with his publisher, with six poems ordered cut for offending public morals?

Question 5

Which epic, the older of the two long poems credited to Homer, covers a few weeks in the last year of the Trojan War and turns on the rage of the greatest Greek warrior after his commander takes a captive woman from him, so that he sulks in his tent while his side is slaughtered?

Question 6

Which poem by a reclusive 19th-century American writer, unpublished in her lifetime and found in hand-sewn packets after her death, imagines death as a courteous gentleman who calls in a carriage and drives the speaker slowly past a school, past fields, past the setting sun, toward eternity?

Question 7

What is the name for the ancient form of Arabic, Persian and Urdu love poetry, made of self-contained rhyming couplets, each ending on the same repeated word or phrase, with no narrative thread so that every couplet could stand alone as a jewel?

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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.