Kate Wilkinson 

TS Eliot 50 years on – quiz

One of the 20th century's most influential poets, Eliot died 50 years ago this month. He often wrote of the fragility of memory, but much do you recall about his work?
  
  


  1. Who was the “miglior fabbro” to whom The Waste Land was dedicated?

    1. Ezra Pound

    2. Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

    3. Samuel Beckett

    4. Coco Chanel

  2. Which of these household items is not mentioned in Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?

    1. Teacups

    2. Pillows

    3. Lampshades

    4. Coffee spoons

  3. In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, who is “the master criminal who can defy the Law”?

    1. Macavity

    2. Growltiger

    3. Bustopher Jones

    4. Skimbleshanks

  4. From where did Eliot borrow the original title for The Waste Land, He Do the Police In Different Voices?

    1. A popular music hall song

    2. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

    3. Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

    4. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

  5. Which popular nursery rhyme is mentioned at the end of The Waste Land?

    1. Ring-a-roses

    2. London Bridge is Falling Down

    3. Humpty Dumpty

    4. Jack and Jill

  6. Which of these is a phrase from Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?

    1. Do I dare to eat a peach?

    2. Do I presume to pare a plum?

    3. Do I try to swallow a grape?

    4. Do I need to marinade a melon?

  7. Which religious building is central to Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral?

    1. Durham cathedral

    2. Salisbury cathedral

    3. Westminster cathedral

    4. Canterbury cathedral

  8. "No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,/ Then thunder, a shower of quotes/ From the Sanskrit and Dante./ Da. Damyata. Shantih./ I hope you'll make sense of the notes." Whose Waste Land parody?

    1. Wendy Cope

    2. WH Auden

    3. Elizabeth Bishop

    4. Dr Seuss

  9. Which work is sometimes referred to as Eliot’s "conversion poem"?

    1. The Hollow Men

    2. Ash Wednesday

    3. The Journey of the Magi

    4. Whispers of Immortality

  10. Before becoming established as a towering presence in literature, Eliot worked for a bank. Which one?

    1. NatWest

    2. Lloyds

    3. Lehman Brothers

    4. Abbey National

Solutions

1:A, 2:C, 3:A, 4:C, 5:B, 6:A, 7:D, 8:A, 9:B, 10:B

Scores

  1. 3 and above.

    Appalling – your mind is a hollow Waste Land which knows "only a heap of broken images"

  2. 7 and above.

    Not bad! "Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/ Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse."

  3. 10 and above.

    Full marks, congratulations! You may not have "squeezed the universe into a ball/ To roll it toward some overwhelming questions" – but you've answered a bunch of trivial ones perfectly
 

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