Billy Mills 

Poetry classics – quiz

How well do you know your knights errant from your coy mistresses? Find out in our fiendishly difficult quiz
  
  


  1. Whose knight errant ends his tale by putting his horn to his lips and blowing the title of the poem he features in?

    1. Alfred Lord Tennyson's

    2. Geoffrey Chaucer's

    3. Robert Browning's

    4. Thomas Mallory's

  2. What is the occupation of the man who puts up danger signs near the church in a town Dürer might have liked?

    1. Steeplejack

    2. Firefighter

    3. Street cleaner

    4. Police officer

  3. A willing mistress leaves us guessing in the last line of a poem by whom?

    1. John Donne

    2. Andrew Marvell

    3. John Wilmot

    4. Aphra Behn

  4. In a ballad, Christina Rossetti wished for beds for all who what?

    1. Need

    2. Want

    3. Ail

    4. Come

  5. Which American poet had a Great Aunt Sarah who practised Saint Saens silently on a dummy piano?

    1. TS Eliot

    2. Wallace Stevens

    3. Robert Lowell

    4. Sylvia Plath

  6. 'How silently, and with how wan a face!’ Who or what is Sir Philip Sidney addressing?

    1. The moon

    2. Astrophil

    3. Elizabeth

    4. His sister

  7. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem attacking the hypocrisy of the lovers of ….

    1. Democracy

    2. Life

    3. The poor

    4. God

  8. Who decides at the end of an epigram that one might as well live?

    1. Ernest Hemingway

    2. Walter Savage Landor

    3. Sara Teasdale

    4. Dorothy Parker

  9. What kind of weather glazes William Carlos Williams' famous red wheelbarrow?

    1. Rain

    2. Sun

    3. Snow

    4. Frost

  10. Who wrote a sonnet in praise of John Milton?

    1. Algernon Charles Swinburne

    2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    4. Gary Snyder

Solutions

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

Scores

  1. 3 and above.

    You've got a Long-way-to-go-Fellow. You're certainly not Donne yet.

  2. 6 and above.

    You know the worth of words, but maybe not your Wordsworth - yet.

  3. 10 and above.

    Congratulations! Let everyone Marvell at your poetical prowess.

 

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