You are here: 10 Questions - Famous Poetry Lines



Famous Lines in Poems

Which poems do the following lines come from? And can you name the poets who wrote them?

Poetry Quiz: famous line - year written


  1. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same. - 1909
  2. I wandered lonely as a cloud. - 1802 (Note: We're looking for the common short name of this poem!)
  3. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. - 1850
  4. A little learning is a dang'rous thing. - 1711






  5. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. - 1798
  6. Not with a bang but a whimper. - 1925
  7. They dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon. - 1870
  8. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. - 1818
  9. Shall I compare thee to a summers day. - 1609
  10. April is the Cruellest Month. - 1922
  11. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. - 1875
  12. If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field, that is for ever England. - 1915


The Poems and the Poets



  1. If (Rudyard Kipling)
  2. Daffodils (William Wordsworth)
  3. In Memoriam A.H.H. (by Lord, Alfred Tennyson)
  4. An Essay on Criticism (by Alexander Pope)
  5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (the longest major poem by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
  6. The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot)
  7. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (a nonsense poem by Edward Lear)
  8. Endymion (John Keats)
  9. Sonnet 18 (one of the best-known sonnets of William Shakespeare)
  10. The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
  11. Invictus (William Ernest Henley)
  12. The Soldier (Rupert Brooke)