Welcome to our Quizzes for Lovers of Poetry

Quiz Questions I

1. "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day", is the first line of which poem?
2. Name the first poet to buried in Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey?
3. Who served as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998?
4. Which poet worked for thirty years as a librarian at Hull University?






5. Which Irish poet was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923?
6. "April is the cruellest month", is a famous phrase from which poem?
7. In The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, how many rode into the valley of Death?
8. "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same" are lines from which poem? And these very lines are written on the players' entrance to which famous sporting arena?
9. Who wrote the children's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin?
10. How many liners are there in a Sonnet?
11. The poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth, is often given which alternative one word title?
12. In Homer's epic Greek poem The Iliad, who is the principal Greek champion whose anger is one of the main elements of the story?
13. "That there’s some corner of a foreign field, that is for ever England" is a line from which poem?
14. What was the primary made-up nonsense word in “The Owl and the Pussycat”, a nonsense poem by Edward Lear?
15. Complete the title of the Pam Ayres poem: Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me....? (Hint: one word is required)
16. In a 1941 speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill paraphrased the last two lines of which poem by William Ernest Henley, when he stated "We are still masters of our fate. We still are captains of our souls."?

Answers:

1. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (by Thomas Gray)
2. Geoffrey Chaucer
3. Ted Hughes (he was married to American poet Sylvia Plath)
4. Philip Larkin
5. William Butler Yeats
6. The Waste Land (a long poem by Thomas Stearns Eliot)
7. 600
8. If (by Rudyard Kipilng). Centre Court, Wimbledon.
9. Robert Browning
10. 14 lines
11. Daffodils
12. Achilles
13. The Soldier (by Rupert Brooke)
14. Runcible
15. Teeth
16. Invictus

Quiz Questions II

1. What word comes at the end of the famous line: "Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous ..."?
2. Who was appointed Britain's first female Poet Laureate in May 2009?






3. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is a line from which John Keats poem?
4. Which well known female American poet was during her lifetime "more widely known as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet"?
5. Which new word, taken from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, is defined as a combination of 'chuckle' and 'snort'?
6. Name the cottage on the edge of the Lake District's Grasmere, that is famous for being the home of the poet William Wordsworth?
7. The epic poem Paradise Lost was written by English poet John Milton in which century?
8. "Dulce et Decorum est" was written by which poet during World War I?
9. Who wrote the poem O Captain! My Captain!?
10. Which disaster is the subject of a poem by William McGonagall, who has been widely 'acclaimed' as the worst poet in history?
11. Which poem was published on 13 February 1898 under the name C.3.3., which stood for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3?
12. Who wrote the poem "And did those feet in ancient time", best known today as the hymn Jerusalem?
13. "‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a line written by which poet?
14. Who wrote the narrative poem Venus and Adonis?
15. “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” is a line from which poem?
16. Which poets wrote the following: (a)Paul Revere’s Ride, (b)The Tyger, (c)In Flanders Fields, (d)Kubla Khan, and (e)Do not go gentle into that good night?

Answers:

1. Beastie (from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns)
2. Carol Ann Duffy
3. Ode on a Grecian Urn
4. Emily Dickinson
5. Chortle
6. Dove Cottage
7. 17th-century (published in 1667)
8. Wilfred Owen
9. Walt Whitman
10. The Tay Bridge Disaster
11. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (by Oscar Wilde)
12. William Blake
13. "In Memoriam" (by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
14. William Shakespeare (in 1593)
15. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
16. (a)Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (b)William Blake, (c)John McCrae, (d)Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and (e)Dylan Thomas