10 British Poets: A Quiz

Question: Which of these poets rose to fame with “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”?: Answer: Thomas Gray’s lyric poem “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” was published in 1751. Its success was instantaneous and overwhelming.

Question: Which poet was the husband of the author of Frankenstein?: Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley was the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of the novel Frankenstein.

Question: Who introduced into England the styles and metres of the Italian humanist poets, including the sonnet form?: Answer: The sonnet was introduced to England, along with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the 16th century.

Question: Which poet wrote The Farmer’s Bride and was admired by Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Hardy, among others?: Answer: Charlotte Mew had numerous admirers, including Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Sara Teasdale, John Masefield, and Hugh Walpole. Foremost among them was Thomas Hardy. Critics noted that the two writers influenced each other, Hardy admiring Mew’s country sensibility and belief in human cruelty and Mew captured by the tragic love of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Mew’s first book of poems was The Farmer’s Bride (1916, expanded 1921).

Question: What poet and Latin scholar wrote A Shropshire Lad?: Answer: The English poet and Latin scholar A.E. Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad (1896).

Question: Which of these poets wrote the poem Don Juan?: Answer: The English Romantic poet Lord Byron composed Don Juan (1819–24) as a satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. He transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent young man.

Question: Which of these poets lost his sight toward the end of his literary career?: Answer: John Milton was 43 years old when he lost his sight. He was inevitably and profoundly depressed by the loss. It had been failing for years, and his blindness became complete in the winter of 1651–52.

Question: Which poem by John Gower runs to some 33,000 lines?: Answer: John Gower’s long poem Confessio amantis (begun c. 1386) runs to some 33,000 lines in octosyllabic couplets. It takes the form of a collection of exemplary tales placed within the framework of a lover’s confession to a priest of Venus.