It's Full of Stars Trivia Quiz

Answer: William Shakespeare

Sonnet #116 is perhaps Shakespeare's most well-known and beloved sonnet, for it defines succinctly in just fourteen lines what love is and what it is not. In the two lines within the question, the speaker explains through metaphorical language that love is so valuable that its worth can never be measured; one might estimate the distance of a star from the earth, but its value to a wandering sailor who depends upon it for guidance can never be measured. Shakespeare wrote at least 154 sonnets, which are collected under the simple title of "Sonnets".

Interestingly, if not shockingly to some, around two thirds of these sonnets are addressed from an older man to a younger man; the older man is offering advice about love and praising the younger man for both his outer and inner beauty.

The final third of the sonnets are about the speaker's feelings about his attraction to a dark-skinned woman.

Answer: Great Expectations

"Great Expectations" was written by Charles Dickens and was published as a weekly serial from December 1860 to August 1861. Toward the end of 1861, it was published as a novel in three volumes. Early in the novel, Pip, the main character, describes the stars in a negative manner: "A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude". Later, when Pip compares Estella to a star as she leads him to Miss Havisham's room, the reader is exposed to a girl who treats Pip coldly and then abandons him in the darkness to confront Miss Havisham alone. Of course, Miss Havisham is a woman who has given up on life and embraced hatred and, truth be told, death itself.

Here, we see stars as symbols of those things in life which promise us hope and happiness but lead us instead to suffering and death. Very early in his own life, Charles Dickens learned the principle of "all that glitters is not gold"; his father tried to give his family a material life beyond their financial ability and ended up spending time in a debtor's prison.

Answer: The Open Boat

Stephen Crane published "The Open Boat" in June of 1897 in "Scribner's Magazine". On January 1, 1897, Crane left Jacksonville, Florida, on board the "Commodore" to serve as a correspondent reporting on a Cuban insurrection. The next morning, the ship sank, and Crane with three other men managed to navigate a ten-foot dinghy to Daytona Beach the following day. Crane chose to use his experiences to create the piece of fiction called "The Open Boat".

As a typical naturalist story, "The Open Boat" depicts the human struggle against nature and an existence devoid of any caring higher power. Crane chooses to portray such a universe through the symbol of a star, a source of light too far away to offer any salvation but close enough to offer man a false sense of hope that eventually evolves into frustration.

In other words, the naturalist argues that man is lost in a cold, dark world with no caring god to help him, yet he stubbornly and selfishly holds on to the belief that there is a benevolent supreme being.

In 1871, Crane was born the fourteenth and last child of a Methodist minister, and he died in 1900 at the age of 28 after a battle with tuberculosis. For a while, in between, he lived in New York City's Bowery and reported on the crime, poverty, and prostitution there. Perhaps, the austerity of his life and others' had an impact on his view of existence.

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson lived from 1803 to 1882 and possessed one of those personalities that ignited extreme responses among other American writers. Herman Melville, of "Moby Dick" fame, hated Emerson and considered him the "great American philosophical con man". Melville felt Emerson's excessive optimism was setting Americans up for a fall. On the other hand, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman devoted their lives to Emerson's teachings.

He also angered people of traditional religious faith because of his transcendental views, which were considered heretical by Christian leaders and thinkers.

After delivering his "Divinity School Address" in 1838 to Harvard graduates, he was barred from speaking there again for thirty years, despite Harvard's being Emerson's alma mater.

Answer: George Gordon, Lord Byron

Byron's untitled poem referred to as "She walks in beauty" was published in 1815. He wrote the poem the morning after he met a cousin-in-law who had been wearing a black mourning gown glittering with spangles. Byron lived for a year in an unhappy marriage filled with discord, and during his separation from his wife, he became acquainted with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, basically a stranger to him as they had lived apart their entire lives. Byron seemed always compelled to participate in forbidden activity, but his English contemporaries were not accepting of his incestuous relationship.

He eventually left England and moved to Italy and then Greece, where he died assisting the Greeks in their war for independence from the Turks. He is considered a national hero of Greece to this day.

Answer: Les Miserables

This quotation is from Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables", Volume IV, Book V, Chapter IV (entitled "A Heart Beneath a Stone"), a novel published in 1862. Many critics and writers at the time did not like the book. In fact, while the French poet Charles Baudelaire gave the book a positive review in public, he expressed his hatred for it privately among his acquaintances. Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist who wrote "Madame Bovary", rejected what many now consider Hugo's masterpiece as possessing "neither truth nor greatness".

The Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War liked the book, or at least the stories of "the miserable ones", and they sometimes referred to themselves as "Lee's Miserables", a pun on the name of the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.

Answer: Walt Whitman

The quotation is the first line of stanza 31 from "Song of Myself", a very lengthy poem in free verse by Walt Whitman. The poem is, of course, found in the great but controversial American masterpiece of his called "Leaves of Grass". Whitman is certainly an interesting figure from American history.

His work was frequently criticized as obscene (John Greenleaf Whittier is said to have thrown his copy into a fire), and some considered him a "pompous ass". On the other hand, just as many considered him a patriot and prophet.

He supported prohibition of alcohol, even writing one novel early in his career in defence of temperance, yet he would later claim to be embarrassed by his support of such ideas. He was influenced by deism and transcendentalism, but he also claimed to accept all churches while believing in none of them.

He celebrated democracy and equality, yet he supported imperialism, the Mexican War, and America's attempts to acquire more land. He supported the abolition of slavery yet hesitated to support giving African-Americans the right to vote and was bothered by their presence in Congress.

His sexual orientation to this day remains a mystery; his poetry and various letters written by him suggest that he had relationships with both women and men.

Answer: William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats lived from 1865 to 1939. Influenced by British romanticism and American transcendentalism, much of his poetry prior to the twentieth century was rather traditional and focused on nature and spirituality. However, after the turn of the century, Yeats turned the world of poetry on its head with a more physical, political, and realist poetry. Yeats met the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne in 1889, fell in love with her, and pursued her for many years despite her rejections to his marriage proposals.

She claimed to love Yeats but would not marry him because of his unwillingness to devote himself to the nationalist life she had chosen for herself. "Ephemera" seems to capture their relationship, for it is about a couple who love each other but are unable to be together, and the word "ephemera" means "something transitory, not meant to be preserved or maintained".

Answer: Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde lived from 1854 to 1900. His full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. "Lady Windermere's Fan" was Wilde's first successful play, first performed in 1892. His more well-known "The Importance of Being Earnest" was first performed in 1895.

It would be his last, for he would later be arrested and imprisoned for "gross indecency" due to his homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. He would write a lengthy literary letter from prison called "De Profundis" and a poem called "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" in France after his release in 1897.

He spent the last three years of his life in poverty under the alias of Sebastian Melmoth. In November of 1900 at the age of 46 he died of cerebral meningitis. His last words are rumored to be, "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go".

Answer: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was published in 1885 in the United States by Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens. Twain actually began work on the novel in the 1870's, but because of writer's block, indecision about the book's purpose, and general frustration, he worked off and on for several years on its completion.

In fact, the book was originally supposed to be a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and was going to be told in third-person narration as "Tom Sawyer" was, instead of first-person narration as it ended up being.

Despite the book's attempt to criticize American society for all of its corruption, ignorance, and hypocrisy, Twain's novel is often banned in many places around the country because the characters--including Huck--use racist language.

However, most critics agree that Twain is exposing the ignorant and contemptible racism of the American people among all the other faults he exposes in the novel. The quotation in the question is part of a larger argument made in the book by Twain that Huck can return to a childlike innocence in the purity of nature while the innocence of a child is corrupted whenever that child enters civilization.