For Poetry Lovers Trivia Quiz

Answer: Chaucer

The opening lines to the 'Prologue of the Canterbury Tales'. A delightful medieval tale of a motley group of pilgrims on their way to Thomas a Becket's shrine in Canterbury.

Answer: Shakespeare

The lines come from "To the Memory of my Beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us." Certainly one of the longest titles I have come across.

Answer: Herbert

This delightful poem is built on a conceit like Pandora's box. The only difference is God retained rest instead of hope, believing that a longing for rest would draw all souls back to Him. Herbert was a minister and many of his finest poems have a religious theme.

Answer: Curl

Of course, you recognise Alexander Pope at his wittiest in this send- up of an Augustan bimbo. He called her Belinda, showing she was making a fuss over nothing. Pope later wrote an introduction, in which in true mock heroic style, he revealed the woman's identity, as Mrs. Arabella Fermor. It is deliciously wickedly funny.

Answer: Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats once wrote that he hoped to live until "my pen has gleaned my teeming brain". He died aged 26, having enriched us with a fabulous legacy.

Answer: Coleridge

Coleridge wrote this fragment which he recalled from a drugged sleep. A visitor from Porlock interrupted him and the work was never completed. Visitors still often come at the wrong time.

Answer: Fitzgerald

Khayyam was a Persian poet and astronomer from the 11th century. Fitzgerald translated this work in the mid nineteenth century and it has been very popular since.

Answer: Thrush

Hardy was alone in a bleak wintry countryside, where he leant upon a "coppice gate", where the song of a "blast beruffled" thrush lifted his gloomy spirits.

Answer: Hopkins

What Van Gogh was to art, Hopkins, in my humble opinion, was to literature, a genius with a troubled soul. In his nature poetry he took the English language shook it up and injected it with dynamic raw energy.
"Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through". This describes just one movement of the stream in 'Inversnaid'.
Hopkins developed two new poetic concepts, instress and inscape, in his 'Terrible Sonnets', to try to verbalise the mental angst of a manic depressive.

Answer: J Alfred Prufrock

Of course, you all are correct. That concludes this evening's entertainment. The next programme will concentrate exclusively on twentieth century poetry and I look forward to your company.
Good night and drive safely.