Bad Pickup Lines: Poetry Edition Quiz

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

In his influential essay "The Philosophy of Composition", Edgar Allan Poe proclaimed that the death of a beautiful woman is the most beautiful topic in the world. Small wonder, then, that some of his best-known poetry, including "Annabel Lee" (reproduced above in modified forn) and "The Raven" are told by a speaker who has just experienced the death of a lover. For all his scary short stories and heart-aching love poetry, Poe was also an important literary critic. In "The Poetic Principle", the Baltimore native rejected the ideas of the Fireside authors and their narrative poetic epics. Similarly, he explained the idea of a "unity of effect" present in a poem or story, which restricts the length of reading to a single sitting so that the reader can comprehend the whole work in one go.

Poe only ever wrote one novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", which was published anonymously, preferring to make a name for himself with shorter works.

Answer: Dante

For good reason, the terza rima style is inextricably linked to Dante, who used it throughout his masterpiece "Divine Comedy", itself composed of three parts ("Inferno", "Purgatorio", and "Paradiso"). The style uses an interlocking rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC DED, and although it has been applied since (notably, by Percy Shelley and Robert Frost), the origin lies with the Florentine master. Literary critics say that the rhyme scheme propels the narrative along, tercet-by-tercet, as Dante progresses deeper and deeper into hell.

The terza rima also proposes additional challenges for translators, since it is not an easy form to mimic while safeguarding meaning. The original "Divine Comedy" was written in Italian (not Latin, which was a pretty big deal for the 14th century). Some translators of the epic, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, didn't even try to imitate it. Definitive translations into English maintaining Dante's meter include versions by Dorothy Sayers and Robert Pinsky.

Answer: Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet's 1650 poetry collection "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America" was a prophetic, albeit arrogant, title. The poems were allegedly published without her consent, probably because Puritans weren't fans of women writing poetry and then comparing themselves to Greek goddesses. It's all right, though--she shortly did penance by writing the self-abusive poem "The Author to Her Book", which begins by calling her poetry an "ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain". Yikes.

Bradstreet was, in fact, the first female poet to be published in America. I've parodied one of her best poems, "To My Dear and Loving Husband", above: the real work goes like this:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole Mines of Gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Answer: Matthew Arnold

One of my all-time favorite poems, and also one of the all-time most heavily anthologized poems, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" is equal parts love song and song of despair. Arnold's speaker laments the "eternal note of sadness" that can be heard at the cliffs of Dover, caused by the ebbing of the "Sea of Faith". Modern technology and ideas have unveiled the "naked shingles of the world", and the speaker proclaims that "the world, which seems/To lie before us, like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light". The last three lines of the poem are the most moving, and are said to refer to a scene from the Peloponnesian War:

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Ray Bradbury quoted the poem in "Fahrenheit 451", a novel tackling similar themes of despair and the loss of interpersonal connections due to modern technologies.

Answer: Edward Estlin Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings (or as is often preferred, e e cummings) evidently earns his principal rank among the modernists for his beautiful love poetry and not for his capitalization abilities.

Like all the good modernists, he served as an ambulance driver in WWI, during which he was captured by the French and imprisoned. That experience informed his breakout novel "The Enormous Room". Nevertheless, it's the poetry that cummings wrote after the war that really stands out: iconic verses like "anyone lived in a pretty how town" or "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" or the poem that I've butchered, "i carry your heart with me".

Answer: Andrew Marvell

"To His Coy Mistress" is probably the most famous verse of Andrew Marvell, who wrote most of his politically tinged poetry around the time of Oliver Cromwell. This one isn't political, though: most scholars would agree that it fits the genre of a "carpe diem" poetry--urging the speaker's lover to "seize the day". Iconic phrases like "Time's winged chariot" and "the grave's a fine and private place" originate with this poem.

Marvell, along with his good friend John Milton, was a good politician too. During one of England's most chaotic epochs, he managed to write state-sponsored poetry under both Charles I and II, and under Cromwell too. Another of his best-known poems, "Upon Appleton House", was written at the namesake estate of Thomas Fairfax, a leader of the Parliamentarians. Marvell also wrote a highly praised and objective "Horatian Ode" after Cromwell's notorious campaign in Ireland.

Answer: T.S. Eliot

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is T.S. Eliot's fine contribution to the genre of "desperate seeks unrequited female love" poetry, but it could hardly be further from "To His Coy Mistress" in style or content. From the opening line about a patient etherised upon a table, "Prufrock" repeatedly belies expectations with modern, mundane imagery cutting across classical allusions. The poem's epigraph is from Dante's "Divine Comedy", and it repeatedly cites images like Michelangelo, Hamlet, and mermaids. Yet the speaker is uncomfortable confessing his love, taking refuge in these "half-deserted streets", is afraid to even eat a peach, and prefers to wait with a hundred different indecisions, visions, and revisions.

"Prufrock", published in 1915, was one of Eliot's first seriously acclaimed poems. Seven years later, he became every Modernist's envy with the inimitable, dare-I-say-incomprehensible, epic "The Waste-Land". Born in the US, Eliot re-naturalized to Britain right as WWI was beginning. The pollution in the Thames inspires the speaker's rambling thoughts in the middle of the poem.

Answer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is largely remembered today for Sonnet 43 out of her 44-poem collection "Sonnets from the Portuguese", which begins:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

Robert Browning, also a great poet, convinced Elizabeth to publish "Sonnets from the Portuguese", convinced that it was the best sonnet sequence in centuries. He also inspired the collection's name, having given Elizabeth the nickname "the Portuguese" due to her dark complexion. E. Browning is also known for the verse novel in nine books titled "Aurora Leigh", which was published in 1856.

Answer: John Donne

The poem I've written above is actually a parody of several John Donne poems, including "The Canonization" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". The Englishman, who lived around the turn of the 17th century, is known today as the foremost representative of the metaphysical poets--a group that also included Andrew Marvell, and believed that every poem ever should be about love or lust.

Okay, a slight exaggeration. But many of Donne's best-known poems have these common extended metaphors, or "conceits". When Donne wasn't busy writing secretly R-rated poetry, he also penned the "Holy Sonnets", a collection of 30 poems published posthumously in 1633. These poems, which include such titles as "Batter my heart, three-person'd god" and "Death, be not proud", secured the author's reputation not just as a love poet, but also one capable of writing serious verse.

Answer: Shakespeare

The 14-line poem in iambic pentameter with rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG is so inextricably linked to the Bard that nowadays critics just call it a Shakespearean sonnet. Of course, most people would just recognize Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the well-known "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" poem. However, Will also wrote 153 other poems in his collected sonnets, many of which are unrequited love poems addressed to the mysterious characters "the Fair Youth" or "the Dark Lady". Interestingly, not all of the poems are traditional Shakespearean sonnets. Some have 13 lines, some have 15 or 16 lines, and the final poem in the collection is actually a rhyme royal epic of 47 heptets. The other sonnets also have other great moments too. Proust's title "Remembrance of Things Past" comes from Sonnet 30. Sonnet 130 is the infamous "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun". And Sonnet 116 begins by pledging, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment".

In addition to his poetry, Shakespeare wrote several plays, including "Love's Labour's Lost" and "Pericles, Prince of Tyre". Perhaps you've heard of some others. :)