Poets and Poetry of Great Britain Quiz

Question: Which English poet and playwright was imprisoned in the Tower of London until 1654?

Answer: The English poet, playwright, and theatre manager Sir William Davenant was made poet laureate on the strength of such successes as the comedy The Witts (licensed 1634) and a volume of poems, Madagascar (published 1638). A supporter of King Charles I during the Civil War in 1642, he was knighted by the king in 1643 for running supplies across the English Channel. After the execution of Charles I, his queen sent Davenant to aid the Royalist cause in America as lieutenant governor of Maryland. Davenant’s ship was captured in the English Channel, however, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London until 1654.

Question: Who or what is the speaker in the poem “The Dream of the Rood”?

Answer: “The Dream of the Rood” is an Old English lyric in which the unknown poet beholds a beautiful tree—the rood, or cross, on which Christ died. The rood, as the speaker of the poem, tells him its own story.

Question: Who wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost?

Answer: John Miltonwrote Paradise Lost, which is generally regarded as the greatest epic poem in the English language.

Question: What poet collaborated with the composer William Walton on the entertainment Façade?

Answer: English poet Edith Sitwell first gained fame for her stylistic artifice but emerged during World War II as a poet of emotional depth and profoundly human concerns. Her emphasis on the value of sound in poetry was shown especially in Façade (1923), an entertainment for which William Walton wrote a musical accompaniment.

Question: What Modernist poet wrote Lunar Baedeker?

Answer: Mina Loywrote Lunar Baedeker (1923), a collection of poetry that stressed feminine experience and art for art’s sake.

Question: Which poet wrote these lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England”?

Answer: The English poet Rupert Brooke won fame in 1915 with his collection of wartime sonnets titled 1914. They express great idealism in the face of death that is in strong contrast to his later poetry of trench warfare. One of his most popular sonnets, “The Soldier,” begins with these lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.”

Question: Which of these is a collection of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth?

Answer: Lyrical Ballads (1798) is a collection of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. It is often designated by scholars as a signal of the beginning of the English Romantic movement.

Question: Whose book The Hunting of the Snark has been called the longest and best-sustained nonsense poem in the English language?

Answer: Especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll also wrote The Hunting of the Snark (1876), which has been called the longest and best-sustained nonsense poem in the English language.

Question: Which Romantic poet was deeply interested in politics and argued in the critical essay A Defence of Poetry that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”?

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Question: Who wrote the words “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace” in a poem urging his mistress to seize the day?

Answer: Andrew Marvell was a 17th-century English poet. In his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” the impatient poet urges his mistress to abandon her false modesty and submit to his embraces before time and death rob them of the opportunity to love: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.... / But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity... / The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace....”