Location, Location, Location! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Tintern Abbey

The full title of Wordsworth's poem is "Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798". Wordsworth made these remarks about the piece: "No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol". Thus, he composed 159 lines of blank verse in his mind and kept them in his memory until he had the opportunity to put them to paper. The poem presents two interesting ideas: one, the power of a place to become a part of who and what we are, and two, the power of the senses and the mind to create the reality of place.

Tintern Abbey was founded in May of 1131 by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow. It was occupied by Cistercian Monks of the Benedictine Order. It was abandoned during the sixteenth century due to King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries and the taking of their properties and valuables. The ruins were the inspiration not only for Wordsworth's poem but also for Tennyon's "Tears, Idle Tears", Ginsberg's "Wales Visitation", and several paintings by Turner.

Answer: Chicago

Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" first appeared in the 1914 publication of "Poetry" magazine and was later published again in 1916 in his own volume of poetry entitled "Chicago Poems". Sandburg frequently used his poetry to push his socialist and populist ideas that the working class people of America would ultimately shape their own destinies without the assistance of the educated intellectuals and their agendas. As was stated in the question, Sandburg had a deep appreciation for the people's energy and was outraged at the injustices they were made to suffer.

Sandburg was also a prominent figure in the Chicago Renaissance movement. The writers and artists in this movement felt that the Midwest, as the heartland of America, represented the culture and values of America and that Chicago was its center. They hoped to expose the working class culture and values to all of America on a large scale through their art.

Answer: Ben Jonson

Patronage was the name of the game in Ben Jonson's time. Poets would frequently write pieces praising someone of the nobility and hoping for a reward like a pension or an office. This is what Edmund Spenser, a somewhat earlier poet, was up to with the composition of his "Faerie Queene" in which he flatters Queen Elizabeth I herself. Ben Jonson chose the unique route of praising his prospective patron's home rather than directly praising the patron himself, Sir Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester. Significantly, Robert Sidney was the younger brother of Sir Philip Sidney, a most celebrated poet of the English Renaissance. Jonson suggests that much of Penshurst's glory and Edenic qualities are related to its being the birthplace of Philip Sidney. He writes, "That taller tree, which of a nut was set / At his great birth where all the Muses met. / There in the writhed bark are cut the names / Of many a sylvan, taken with his flames". Later, Jonson praises Robert Sidney's family for its purity by commenting on Sidney's wife's fidelity: "Thy lady's noble, fruitful, chaste withal. / His children the great lord may call his own, / A fortune in this age but rarely known". Furthermore, the place is so beautiful, not only has King James I visited its grounds but Pan and Bacchus as well.

The play mentioned in the question that relates to the photograph would be "Volpone", which translates to "fox".

Answer: Edwin Arlington Robinson

E. A. Robinson grew up in Gardiner, Maine, and then had to leave Harvard without a degree to return there to take care of his family after his father's land speculations and lumber business failed during the economic Panic of 1893. Furthermore, one of his brothers, abusing his access to medication as a physician, became a drug addict, and another became an alcoholic. The gloom of life in this small New England town obviously had a tremendous impact on Robinson's poetry and his view of the human condition.

The poems referred to in the question are "Mr. Flood's Party", "Miniver Cheevy", and "Richard Cory".

Answer: Mont Blanc

Percy Shelley wrote "Mont Blanc" with two purposes in mind. First, he wanted to write a poem that was directly imitative of the alternating wildness and solemnity of a scene in nature along with the harmonious thoughts and feelings that were created by that scene, all of which was typical of the Romantic poets. Second, he wanted to create a descriptive and meditative presentation of a familiar landscape to follow the inspiration of William Wordsworth's "Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey".

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain of the Alps and is the highest mountain in Europe outside of the Caucasus. The first ascent, at least the first recorded one, occurred on August 8, 1786. It is currently ascended by an average of 20,000 climbers a year, and while it is considered an "easy climb" by many mountaineers, several climbing deaths occur each year.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

As Emily Dickinson did not title her poems, most refer to them by their first lines. The poem referred to in the question begins, "I years had been from Home". However, this very poem is often numbered 609 in the 1955 variorum publication of her complete works edited by Thomas H. Johnson.

Emily Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886, spent almost all of that time in only two houses: the first ten years in "Homestead", the home of her birth; then from 1840 to 1855 in a large home nearby; and then back to "Homestead", where she lived until she died of Bright's disease. Her one significant absence from home occurred during the school year of 1847-1848, which she spent at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, ten miles away. However, she left the school because of intense homesickness for, in her own words, her "own dear HOME". She later described her home as "the definition of God" and a place of "Infinite power". Most know of Dickinson's growing determination to stay at home without ever leaving it; however, no one to this day truly can offer a definite explanation for her eventual choice to remain isolated.

Answer: Waterloo

Byron felt that the alliance of European governments that had led to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo was an alliance consisting of tyrannts just as hungry for the power they had condemned Napoleon for pursuing. To defeat Napoloen, these governments had performed atrocious and tryranical acts upon the citizens of Europe that they had claimed they were trying to protect. Thus, the narrator ultimately remarks, "He who surpasses or subdues mankind, / Must look down on the hate of those below".

As the Byronic hero Harold wanders into the fields of Waterloo, the narrator laments that no "colossal bust" marks Napoleon's loss--as if he had died here and his grave lay below.

However, he reconsiders and is happy that nature itself, nurtured by the blood of Napoleon's armies, has created a greater tomb than man ever could.

Answer: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Walt Whitman lived in and around New York City for much of his life and, when young, would often cross the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a ferry. At one point in his life, he was the editor of the "Brooklyn Eagle".

The poem exposes the thoughts of a man who is riding the Brooklyn Ferry home from a working day in Manhattan. He sees the number of people on the ferry, thinks of the thousands of people who have ever ridden the ferry and will ride it in the future, and then thinks of the innumerable people who have ever travelled home from somewhere. He feels frustrated at the distance between him and all of these people, yet is amazed by the union he shares with these people because of a common experience. He uses the ebbing and flowing of the waters and the back and forth traveling of the ferry to represent life as a continuous process of drawing close to others and moving away from them at the same time.

Answer: In a Station of the Metro

During the first half of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound spearheaded the poetic movement known as imagism. Its purpose was to present an object or situation in as few words as possible, avoiding description and generalization as well as ornate diction and traditional forms such as rhyme and meter. The poem wasn't supposed to say anything, but rather to present an image for readers to construct in their minds. If there was any meaning to be gleaned from the poem, it would have to come from the very image itself presented as sparsely and cleanly as possible.

Pound eventually settled in Italy, where he became an ardent supporter of Mussolini and a very vocal opponent of the Allied invasion of Italy. He was eventually arrested by invading American forces during World War II, charged with treason, and then found to be criminally insane in a trial back in the United States. He then spent several years in a mental institution, where he continued to write poetry.

Answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Every stanza of the poem ends with the same refrain, a pair of lines with which Longfellow is much associated: "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts". He very much attributed his growth as a poet to the inspiration of his hometown, and later in the poem "My Lost Youth", he writes, "... the friendships old and early loves / Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves / In quiet neighborhoods".

The beard Longfellow wore in his later years and in the photograph was to cover up scars on his face from trying to extinguish a fire that led to his wife's death. She had been attempting to melt some wax to preserve a lock of their child's hair.