The Ultimate Pope's Poetry Quiz | Authors

Answer: fools

"Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead: / For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." This phrase has become a modern day cliché, but it originated with Pope's "Essay on Criticism," which he published at the young age of twenty-three.

Answer: Roman Catholic

Pope's Catholicism prevented him from entering a University, but he received private tutoring from a priest and his aunt; he also taught himself.

Answer: The Rape of the Lock

When Lord Petre cut off a lock of Miss Fermor's hair, it led to a lasting family feud. Pope attempted to get the two families to bury the hatchet by spoofing their feud in this mock heroic. He also used the poem as an opportunity to critique high society.

Answer: divine

The complete couplet from "Essay on Criticism" reads: "Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human; to forgive, divine."

Answer: Prostate Cancer

As a child he contracted tuberculosis, and he suffered from asthma and headaches his entire life. He was ridiculed by critics for his spinal deformity, which left him at just four feet six inches tall. He once referred to "this long disease, my life."

Answer: learning

This is yet another phrase from Pope's " Essay on Criticism" to become a modern day adage.

Answer: True

It is rare for a poet to make a living at his art, but Pope was one of the few to succeed. One way he made money was to sell subscriptions to his translation of Homer's "Illiad."

Answer: twig

Well, if the origin of a non-Biblical proverb isn't Benjamin Franklin, then you can probably guess it's Alexander Pope! This comes from "Moral Essays," and the full couplet is: "'Tis education forms the common mind: / Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined."

Answer: An Essay on Man

"An Essay on Man" appeared in 1733 through 1734, and in it Pope attempted to reconcile the existence of suffering with a benevolent, divine power. It was John Milton who attempted to "justify the ways of God to man" in his earlier epic "Paradise Lost."

Answer: Jonathan Swift

Swift, like Pope, was famous for his satires, though he was much better known for his prose than for his poetry. His works include "A Modest Proposal" and "Arguments Against Abolishing Christianity."

Answer: In the human breast

In his "Essay on Man," Pope reasons: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never is, but always to be blest. / The soul, uneasy and confined from home, / Rests and expatiates in a life to come."

Answer: The Dunciad

The mock hero of the poem is Lewis Theobald, who in 1726 had lambasted Pope's edition of Shakespeare in his "Shakespeare Restored, or A Specimen of the Many Errors as well Committed as Unamended by Mr. Pope." The work was first published in 1728, but he expanded it in 1742 as "The New Dunciad."

Answer: Eloisa to Abelard

After this, Peter Abailard retreated to a monastery and Eloisa became a novice at a convent. Pope's poem takes the form of a letter from Eloisa to her renounced lover, beginning, "In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells, / And ever-musing melancholy reigns; / What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?"

Answer: praise

In his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," Pope satirizes the critic Addison as one who will not only "damn with faint praise" but also "assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

Answer: Right

The theme of Pope's "Essay on Man" is that suffering and God's goodness can, in fact, be reconciled, but we are unable to see that fact because we have a limited vision: "All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; / All discord, harmony not understood; / All partial evil, universal good; / And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."