Medium
Poetry
Forms & Metre
The rules behind the forms, and the poets who shaped them.
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A sonnet traditionally consists of how many lines?
Poets and the Lines They Left
Poets are usually remembered by one poem, fairly or not. Here are ten of those pairings, with what surrounds them.
About this topic
Poetic reputations narrow fast. Wordsworth wrote for fifty years and is quoted for fourteen lines about daffodils. Shelley produced long philosophical poems and survives mainly on a sonnet written in a friendly competition. This is not entirely unjust, since the poems that last usually last for a reason, but it does mean most readers hold a very partial picture of a poet's work. The circumstances behind the famous poems are frequently stranger than the poems suggest. One of the central works of English modernism was cut roughly in half by another poet before publication. One of the most quoted American poets published almost nothing while alive. These questions cover both the attributions and the situations that produced them.
Questions & answers
Poets and the Lines They Left: all 10 questions and answers
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
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1"I wandered lonely as a cloud" opens a poem by whom?
- A Robert Southey
- B William Wordsworth Correct
- C Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- D John Keats
Answer: B. William Wordsworth
Why: It is usually called "Daffodils", though he never gave it that title. His sister Dorothy described the same lakeside walk in her journal two years earlier.
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2Emily Dickinson's poems mostly reached the public when?
- A After her death Correct
- B In her twenties
- C During a single celebrated year
- D Only in serialised newspaper form
Answer: A. After her death
Why: Fewer than a dozen appeared while she was alive, several without her consent. Early editors smoothed out her dashes and capitals, which later editions restored.
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3Leaves of Grass was written by whom?
- A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- B Ralph Waldo Emerson
- C Herman Melville
- D Walt Whitman Correct
Answer: D. Walt Whitman
Why: He kept revising and enlarging it for roughly forty years. The 1855 first edition was a slim volume he set some of the type for himself.
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4"The Waste Land" was written by whom?
- A W. B. Yeats
- B Wallace Stevens
- C T. S. Eliot Correct
- D Ezra Pound
Answer: C. T. S. Eliot
Why: Ezra Pound cut the manuscript by around half before its publication in 1922. Eliot dedicated the poem to him in return.
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5Which poet wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night"?
- A Ted Hughes
- B Dylan Thomas Correct
- C Seamus Heaney
- D Philip Larkin
Answer: B. Dylan Thomas
Why: It is a villanelle, written as his father was going blind and dying. The form requires two lines to recur in a fixed alternating pattern.
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6Pablo Neruda wrote chiefly in which language?
- A Spanish Correct
- B Portuguese
- C Catalan
- D French
Answer: A. Spanish
Why: He was Chilean and served as both a diplomat and a senator. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.
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7"Still I Rise" was written by whom?
- A Gwendolyn Brooks
- B Nikki Giovanni
- C Audre Lorde
- D Maya Angelou Correct
Answer: D. Maya Angelou
Why: It appeared in a 1978 collection of the same name. She read a poem at a United States presidential inauguration in 1993.
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8The Divine Comedy was written by whom?
- A Giovanni Boccaccio
- B Ludovico Ariosto
- C Dante Alighieri Correct
- D Petrarch
Answer: C. Dante Alighieri
Why: He wrote it in Tuscan rather than Latin, which helped make that dialect the basis of standard Italian. He was in exile from Florence throughout.
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9Matsuo BashÅ is best known for travel journals interspersed with which short form?
- A Ghazals
- B Haiku Correct
- C Tanka
- D Sonnets
Answer: B. Haiku
Why: Strictly, his verses were hokku, the opening links of longer collaborative poems. The word haiku for a standalone verse came into use two centuries later.
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10Which English poet wrote "Ozymandias"?
- A Percy Bysshe Shelley Correct
- B Lord Byron
- C William Blake
- D Alfred Tennyson
Answer: A. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Why: He wrote it in 1817 in a friendly competition with his friend Horace Smith. Smith published a rival sonnet on the same statue a month afterwards.
Read alongside this quiz
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A Germanic language wearing a French coat and carrying a Latin dictionary. Why English spelling is a mess with reasons.
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