Poetry Trivia Questions
In case you missed them, here are the past five Columbia Granger's World of Poetry trivia questions of the day. .
October 17
Question:
Why did Laura (Riding) Jackson renounce writing poetry in 1938?
Answer
Ostensibly (Riding) Jackson pursued writing a dictionary that sought the original meaning of language, something she had sought in her poetry. Over twenty years later, in 1961, (Riding) Jackson began to address publicly her reasons for renouncing poetry. She wrote of how the aesthetic concerns of poetry interfered with expressing the totality of meaning inherent in language and modern society.
October 16
Question:
Whose heteronyms, to borrow Fernando Pessoa's word, included professor Abel Martin and his student Juan de Mairena?
Answer
Antonio Machado Ruiz collected a number of sayings by these apocryphal thinkers, which he called "complementarios." The student, an iconoclast, often reported and critiqued the sayings of the teacher, whose philosophy resembled that of Gottfried Leibniz. There was a third identity as well, but he did not write much.
October 15
Question:
Who, in describing his aesthetic in a lecture, said, "Everything that has black sounds in it has duende"?
Answer
Federico García Lorca spoke these words in his famous lecture "Play and Theory of the Duende." Duende, as he describes it, is a particular type of soulfulness connected to the earth, death and illogic.
October 14
Question:
Who is credited with first popularizing the literary device known as a blason?
Answer
Clément Marot is credited as the source of this literary tradition. Shakespeare provides an ironic interpretation of this established device in his sonnet starting "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."
October 13
Question:
Who, at the start of the Second World War, took a 26 year hiatus from poetry and focused on his career as a social worker?
Answer
Carl Rakosi, one of the original Objectivists, stopped writing and reading poetry from 1941 to 1967.
