Poetry Trivia Questions
In case you missed them, here are the past five Columbia Granger's World of Poetry trivia questions of the day.
November 29
Question:
Which poet's sister (who was also a poet) killed their mother by stabbing her with a table knife?
Answer
Both Charles Lamb and his sister Mary struggled with bouts of mental illness. Mary stabbed and killed their mother in 1796. Charles had her released into his care so that she would not have to spend her life imprisoned.
November 28
Question:
E. E. cummings's The Enormous Room , a novel about being a prisoner of war in World War I, frequently alludes to which allegorical book?
Answer
John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , which was written while the author was imprisoned for preaching without a license.
November 27
Question:
Whose experiments in quantitative verse and syllable-based poetics inspired Samuel Daniel's counter Defense of Rhyme in 1603?
Answer
Thomas Campion's. His position in his 1602 Observations in the Art of English Poesy prefigured many of the twentieth century ideas about syllables as the source of a prosody instead of accentual emphasis.
November 26
Question:
Dubbed "the poet of the Revolution" and editor of the National Gazette , which poet was particularly disliked by President George Washington?
Answer
Friend of Thomas Jefferson, Philip Freneau was called a cur, rascal and dog by George Washington who was the object of many of Freneau's barbs for the Federalist Gazette of the United States ' rival paper.
November 25
Question:
Who won the first Seatonian Prize, an annual Cambridge award given to the best poem by one of its students on a sacred subject?
Answer
In 1750 Christopher Smart won the first Seatonian Prize. (He also won four of the next five.) Lord Byron writes of the prize in his poem "English Bards and Scots Reviewers."
