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Poetry and Poets Questions – GK Questions about Poems Quotes and Authors
1. Francis Thompson wrote poems about:
Answer: God.
2. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action’. Whose lines are these?
Answer: William Shakespeare.
3. ‘The words of the dead man are modified in the guts of living,’ said:
Answer: W.H. Auden.
4. Who wrote: “stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage…”?
Answer: Richard Lovelace.
5. “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace”. Whose lines are these?
Answer: Andrew Marvell.
6. “As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines”. Who said this about epic poetry?
Answer: Thomas Babington Macaulay.
7. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. Where are these lines to be found?
Answer: in Yeats, ‘The second coming’.
8. In which century did Omar Khayyam write his Rubaiyat?
Answer: Eleventh.
9. ‘Ask you what provocation I have had? The strong antipathy of good to bad’. Who said this?
Answer: Alexander Pope.
10. “No Spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face”. Who wrote these lines?
Answer: John Donne.
11. A poet Laureate made the modest claim, “I don’t think that since Shakespeare there has been such a master of the English language as I”. Who is he?
Answer: Tennyson.
12. Who declared so defiantly “I will publish, right or wrong, fools are my theme, let satire be my song”
Answer: Lord Byron.
13. Who said, “Poetry makes nothing happen”?
Answer: W. H. Auden.
14. Who wrote, ‘How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species’?
Answer: D.H. Laurence.
15. Who said, “Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history?”
Answer: Aristotle.
16. “A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man”. A poet’s definition. Which poet?
Answer: E.E. Cummings.
17. “To keep your marriage brimming With love in the marriage cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it: Whenever you’re right, shut up”. Sound advice from a poet who studied women carefully. Who is he?
Answer: Ogden Nash.
18. “Oh East is East, and West is West and never the twain shall meet”. In which poem of Rudyard Kipling does this line occur?
Answer: ‘The Ballad of East and West’.
19. Who has been called the most venomous and malicious of the great English poets?
Answer: Alexander Pope.
20. To which century do Heinrich Heine’s romantic lyrics belong?
Answer: Early nineteenth.
