Great Poetry Is Universal Trivia Quiz

Answer: Byron

The lines come from the beginning of Byron's poem "She Walks In Beauty". The poem continues: "And all that's best of dark and bright / Melt in her aspect and her eyes." The poem was first published in "Hebrew Measures" in 1815. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is also known for "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", "Don Juan", and "Maid Of Athens".

Answer: Comrades leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) published "Locksley Hall" in 1842. In it, the unnamed narrator asks his comrades to leave him alone for a bit. Once alone, he then indicates that he grew up at Locksley Hall and he muses on his past and present feelings, particularly about a lost love.

Many of Tennyson's other poems are considered classics including: "The Lady Of Shalott", "Morte d'Arthur", "Saint Agnes Eve", and "Ulysses".

Answer: Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) begins "Dover Beach" with such words as calm, full, fair, light, and tranquil. The end of the poem, however, presents a quite different view of existence:

"Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! For 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, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / While ignorant armies clash by night."

The other poems listed are among Arnold's other great works.

Answer: Endymion

John Keats (1795-1821) died at 25 from tuberculosis. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" includes these lines: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' --that is all / Ye know on earth, and all you need to know." "Ode to a Nightingale" has, "All ready with thee! tender is the night," and "The Eve Of St. Agnes" begins: "St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was! / The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold."

Answer: William Butler Yeats

"The Second Coming" continues: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

t ends with these lines: "The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Answer: April is the cruelest month

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" begins, "April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain." In the poem, Eliot sees the modern age as a spiritual, cultural, and emotional wasteland, awaiting a rebirth. The other three quotations all come from Eliot's "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock".

Answer: William Shakespeare

These lines come from Shakespeare's "Sonnet CXVI (116)". Here is the entire poem.
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love/
Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove. / Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; /
It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. / Love's not Times fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come; / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom. / If this be error, and upon me prov'd, / I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd."

Answer: An Essay on Criticism

Pope's "Essay On Criticism" is filled with memorable lines; others include: "A little learning is a dangerous thing" and "Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, / Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found."

"An Essay On Man" also has such lines as: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast"; "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man"; and, about man, "Sole judge of truth in endless error hurl'd; / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world."

Answer: Thomas Gray

"Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard" is the poem for which Thomas Gray is known. Written between 1742 and 1750, it was first published in 1751. The first stanza is often quoted:
"The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, / The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

Answer: Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink

The stanza in "The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" reads:

"Water, water every where, / And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink."

The other lines are also from Coleridge. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan..." is from "Kubla Khan", "'Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock..." appears in "Christabel", and "Hear, sweet Spirit, hear the spell..." begins "An Invocation."