It All Began With a Line Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" is the poem, written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom at the time, in response to the disastrous cavalry charge that happened during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. During this battle, the Light Cavalry Brigade was decimated with a heavy loss of life.

The poem was first published in The Examiner on 9 December 1854. The poem cleverly evokes the relentless pace of the horsemen as they gallop into danger. Tennyson based it on articles published in The Times newspaper which suggested that the tragedy was the result of a "hideous blunder".

Answer: Robert Frost

Possibly one of the world's best known poems, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was written by the American poet Robert Frost in 1922. The most famous of Frost's poems, it tells the story of a lone man travelling through a snowy wood at night, enjoying the beauty of his surroundings and his reluctance to leave this special place to return to the responsibilities of his life.

The poem was published in Frost's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of poems "New Hampshire" in 1923.

Answer: T.S. Eliot

Often simply known as "Prucock", "The Love Song of Alfred J Prucock" was written by T S Eliot, the American-born British poet. At the urging of Eliot's friend, the poet Ezra Pound, the poem was first published in the June 1915 edition of "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse". Considered to be quite experimental for its time, the poem did not meet with unqualified success.

The poem depicts an unhappy man, alone in a large city, who feels both isolated and afraid of taking the decisive action he needs to sort out his life.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

If you have ever watched the Wimbledon tennis tournament then you probably will be familiar with the poem "If" written by Rudyard Kipling in 1895. A line from this poem, "If you can meet Triumph and Disaster / and treat these two imposters just the same" is inscribed on a wall at the player's entrance to the famed Centre Court. Rudyard Kipling is the Indian-born British poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on 1907. "If" was first published in the book "Rewards and Fairies in 1910.

It is written as a piece of advice from a father to his son and the poem has been said to epitomise the stoic, "stiff upper lip" culture of the British people.

Answer: Thomas Gray

Written by poet Thomas Gray, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" is one of the best known of all British poems. It is thought to have been started by Gray in around 1746, possibly in response to the death of the poet Richard West, in 1742. The poem was completed in 1750 and was first published on 15 February 1751.

The poem ponders both the subject of death and that of remembrance after death, as the speaker ruminates on the lives led by the ordinary people buried in that country churchyard.

Answer: W.H. Auden

"Funeral Blues" or "Stop all the Clocks" is a poem written by the English poet W.H. Auden, who is known for both love poems such as "Funeral Blues" as well as more political themed works such as "September 1, 1939". Although English by birth, Auden went on to take out American citizenship in 1946. "Funeral Blues" has a bit of a tangled publishing history. An early satirical form of the poem was published in 1936 as part of "The Ascent of F6" which Auden co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood. In 1938 he re-worked the poem to be sung as cabaret to music by Benjamin Britten.

In 1940 the poem was then included by Auden in his anthology "Another Time".

Answer: Edward Lear

Edward Lear (1812-1888) was an English artist, author and poet. He was known for his literary nonsense in both poetry and prose. Limericks were also a specialty.

"The Owl and the Pussycat" (1871) is a children's poem written for a poet (John Addington Symonds) friend's daughter as part of "Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets". The poem is about love between an owl and a cat, assisted in their romance by a pig and a turkey, all of whom were anthropomorphic. There was a sequel, published in part in 1938, "The Children of the Owl and the Pussycat."

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To a Skylark" is an ode to the uncomplicated joy and beauty associated with the bird's song, which lasts long after the skylark has disappeared from view. The bird transcends its physical, form becoming a blithe spirit and a creature of the heavens. English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) published this poem in conjunction with his large lyrical work "Prometheus Unbound" in 1820.

Despite a life cut short by a tragic drowning, Shelley produced several notable other works including "Queen Mab" (1813) and the sonnet "Ozymandias" (1818).

He also wrote on the topic of vegetarianism, a cause for which he was a very strong advocate.

Answer: John Masefield

John Edward Masefield (1878 - 1967) was an English poet and novelist. His best known works were the children's novels "The Midnight Folk" (1927) and "The Box of Delights" (1935).

"Sea-Fever" (1902) was first published in "Salt-Water Ballads" which Masefield's first volume of poetry. It was published again in 1923 in "The Collected Poems of John Masefield". However the two versions were slightly different. In the earlier work, the first line read "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky"; it became "I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky" in the later work, although the second and third stanzas, where the lines were repeated, kept the original form.

Answer: William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) was an English Romantic poet. Between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic Age of English literature started.
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" sometimes known as "Daffodils" is Wordsworth's most famous work. It was inspired by a walk with Dorothy, his sister, around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the English Lake District in 1804. It was written sometimes between 1804 and 1807. In 1995 the poem was voted number five a BBC program to determine the British people's favourite poems.