To celebrate World Poetry Day, our English department have put together a quiz to test your poetry knowledge.
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
- Beastie (from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns)
- Carol Ann Duffy
- Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Emily Dickinson
- Chortle
- Dove Cottage
- 17th-century (published in 1667)
- Wilfred Owen
- Walt Whitman
- The Tay Bridge Disaster
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol (by Oscar Wilde)
- William Blake
- “In Memoriam” (by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
- William Shakespeare (in 1593)
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- (a)Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (b)William Blake, (c)John McCrae, (d)Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and (e)Dylan Thomas
