They Were Poets and They Knew it. Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. French writer Hippolyte Taine compiled a 'History of English Literature' in the middle years of the 19th century. Who did he single out as the finest poet of that century?

Answer: Byron

And he went a bit over the top in his praise. "He is so great and so English," Taine asserted, "that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together." Wow. Byron, I'm certain, would have agreed.

2. Lady Caroline Lamb is remembered for her obsession with which poet?

Answer: Lord Byron

Sometimes, you can't keep them away with a duelling pistol and a clove of garlic. Poor Caroline Lamb. She pursued Byron with ferocity and a twinge of madness, driving the hunted man into a disastrous marriage with Annabella Milbanke. Poor Annabella. She later discovered her husband in a romantic tryst with his own half-sister. Ah, the Romantic poets.

3. Who penned the following lines from 'Meeting at Night'? The gray sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low.

Answer: Robert Browning

By all accounts, Browning was something of a homebody and momma's boy. He was in his mid-thirties when he married Elizabeth Barrett and prior to that he had never been far from his parents' hearth and home. He was often referred to as 'Mrs. Browning's husband'.

4. Who composed the following 'Fragment'? He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Answer: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson was one of twelve children born to an alcoholic preacher. One brother suffered from madness, another from drug addiction. His greatest work, many would argue, is 'In Memoriam A.H.H.' Begun after the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, the entire work was seventeen years in the making.

5. A wonderful essayist, this writer had a rather mad sister. He returned home to wrestle a knife out of her hands...but not before she had stabbed their mother through the heart. Who was he?

Answer: Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was one of the great practitioners of the personal essay. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lamb was not what you'd call a writer with a radical bent. He dismissed many of the 'Romantic' poets. His prose was superbly crafted. The best of it, 'Essays of Elia', is full of wit, humor and a kind of muscular sentimentality.

As for his sister, Mary: she was hospitalized on many occasions after the death of their mother. Still, she and Charles collaborated on a children's book called 'Tales from Shakespeare'.

6. By the ripe old age of twenty-four, this poet had produced an enormous body of (brilliant) work which provided his legacy. He died of tuberculosis in his twenty-sixth year. Who was he?

Answer: John Keats

During the last six years of his life, Keats wrote a stunning amount of poetry. He died at the age of twenty-five, having been a writer for barely seven years. Tuberculosis also took the lives of his mother and his brother, Tom.

7. This writer collaborated with Wordsworth to produce the work 'Lyrical Ballads.' His name?

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel', Coleridge was a heavy user of opium. He had written most of his important work by the age of thirty. And the drug abuse had taken a physical toll. But he continued to re-invent himself - as a lecturer, philosopher and icon to younger writers.

8. Best known as a novelist, he also wrote - and preferred to write - poetry. Who is the poet/novelist author of 'The Egoist'?

Answer: George Meredith

Perhaps his best known poem is 'Modern Love', published in 1862. The lovers have found their marriage to be empty and intolerable. One presumes Meredith was writing from experience. His wife had left the matrimonial stalemate and fled to the continent with an artist.

9. One of the most 'radical' poets of his age -- and arguably the most reviled in his own time due to his politics and personal conduct -- he was the author of 'Prometheus Unbound', among other works. Who is this Englishman?

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley believed in, and celebrated, free love a hundred and fifty years before the so-called 'sexual' revolution of our own era. During his rather public courtship of Mary Godwin, Shelley was already married. (He had eloped with Harriet Westbrook when he was eighteen -- and she sixteen.) While living openly with Mary, Shelley actually invited his long-suffering wife to come and join the love-in. Poor Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself.

Shelley, likewise, suffered a watery death. In 1822, he died in a sailing accident.

His ashes are buried in Rome, near to Keats' resting place.

10. The final poet of this quiz concerns a tortured soul who managed to publish his two major works while still a student at Oxford. These works are 'The Improvisatore' and 'The Bride's Tragedy'. Who is this unhappy fellow?

Answer: Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Nightmares, bizarre visions, madness. Beddoes had it all. He lived forty-six years and tried several times to kill himself. He was finally successful in 1849, dead by poison.

Source: Author yowzayowza

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor MotherGoose before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

This series of questions concerns English writers of the nineteenth century. Tragedy and tomfoolery abounds. Have fun and good luck.

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