A Blade of Grass Trivia Quiz

Answer: Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein wrote many poems with a young audience in mind. "The Giving Tree" was one of his longer poems about a beautiful relationship between a boy and a tree. While the boy is young he plays in the tree's branches which makes the tree happy. As he grows into adolescence, the boy needs money and sells parts of the tree. Being useful makes the tree happy.

The boy grows into a man and uses parts of the tree to make a house and a boat so that there is nothing left of the tree but a stump. In the end, the boy is an old man, and the tree has nothing left to give him. Luckily, all the man wants is a nice place to sit which makes the tree happy. To get the full experience of Silverstein's poems it is valuable to see the author's art that goes with each poem.

Answer: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" to commemorate the death of Abraham Lincoln. Whitman was working in Washington, D.C. at the time of Lincoln's death and, while the two never met, the poet admired the president and was grieved by his passing.

The poem is an extended metaphor comparing Lincoln to the captain of a ship. The metaphor of comparing a nation-state to a ship has its origins in Plato's Republic. It is worth noting that the poetic style of "O Captain! My Captain!" is more of a conventional ballad while most of Whitman's works are in free verse.

Answer: Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes' free-verse poem "Harlem" is all the more powerful for its brevity. The poem's first line asks, "What happens to a dream deferred?" Hughes' 95 poems in "Montage of a Dream Deferred" were intended to be read as one long poem. The dream theme throughout the poems revolves around class struggle. "Harlem" in particular asks four questions about what happens when a dream is never fulfilled.

The last line "Or does it explode?" is probably the most powerful as that is exactly what the civil rights movement did a few short years after the poem was published.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson is a short two-quatrain poem about how it is better to be anonymous than well-known. It is worth noting that as prolific as Dickinson was as a poet, she never published any of her poems in her lifetime. She might have been horrified to learn that she is no longer a nobody! She expresses that it would be dreary to be somebody famous with an "admiring bog" of followers.

Many of Dickinson's poems are in lyrical first person making them easily accessible for the reader to share.

Answer: e.e. cummings

Probably my favorite poem on this list is e.e. Cummings "l(a." The poem is a total of twenty letters divided up into eight lines. Written out it spells "l(a leaf falls)oneliness." The poem has a lot of symbolism around the number one and being alone. First, the shape of the poem is tall like the number one. Second, four of the eight lines of the poem start with the letter "l" which resembles the number one. By dividing the word loneliness between the first "l" and the "one" again gives two separate representations of one. Finally, the act of separating the word "loneliness" highlights being separated from the whole. One letter breaks off from the whole word just as one leaf falls off a tree, or a person is separated alone from society.

This work is beautiful in its depth despite such simplicity.

Answer: T.S. Eliot

While "The Waste Land" is probably T.S. Eliot's greatest poem, "The Naming of Cats" is far more fun. The poem is a whimsical description of how a cat has three names with examples of what they might be. The first name is the common name that their human family gives them.

Their second name is more fancy and takes into consideration a part of their external and internal features. Their final name is the most secret of all, and only the cat itself knows that name. The last is the one the cat cherishes most which is no surprise to anyone who is owned by a cat. "The Naming of Cats" was the first poem in T.S. Eliot's work "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats." Rather than publish the work under his own name, Eliot called himself "Old Possum." This work of poetry has been made famous by the Andrew Lloyd Webber adaption for his musical "Cats."

Answer: Robert Frost

Robert Frost wrote poems that are easy for any reader to enjoy. In his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Frost gives a beautiful romantic snapshot of appreciating the beauty that is around us. A rider on horseback stops in a quiet place to watch a beautiful woods fill up with snow. What really ties the poem together is the last line repeated twice "And miles to go before I sleep." This reminds the reader of all the business that fills life and keeps people away from enjoying the beauty that is around them.

In other words, make more time to stop and smell the roses.

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

While Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories are often the most popular of his works, his poems also deserve appreciation. Possibly my favorite of his poems is "Alone" which starts with a youth who does not fit in with others. In particular, the youth is unable to have the most intimate part of a relationship with others, shared feelings.

This sense of feeling like an outsider is celebrated as the force giving the poet the power to create his art. The writing style of the poem is lyrical free verse with an interesting object-subject-verse arrangement for the first several lines.

For example, "From childhood's hour I have not been." Halfway through the poem it switches to the more common subject-verb-object.

Answer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet is about loving someone completely in life and into death. From a young age Browning had severe health problems that stayed with her throughout life and ultimately took her life at the young age of 55. "How Do I Love Thee" shows the all-consuming nature of true love touching on the physical, mental, and spiritual. Browning's sonnet is in the Petrachan style with the first 8 lines in an iambic "abbaabba" pattern and the last six lines in a "cdcdcd" pattern. Most of her poems were composed in a revolutionary style that we now consider modern and informal.

Answer: Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" is a poem of pure power. It doesn't matter how you try to kill her spirit, she will not give up. After spending her early life during the time of segregation, Angelou became a major leader in the civil rights movement. Her experience of having to fight tooth and nail to be given the same respect as a male nonminority radiates throughout the poem. "Still I Rise" is an absolutely brilliant poem with a beautiful spirit behind the words. Most of the poem is in a trochaic tetrameter style with a scheme of "abcb."