Poetry Trivia Questions
In case you missed them, here are the past five Columbia Granger's World of Poetry trivia questions of the day.
December 4
Question:
Who wrote comical Latin, Greek and medieval French versions of the popular poems of his day and then would claim the originals were the plagiarisms?
Answer
"Father Prout" (Francis Sylvester Mahony) played a number of these types of erudite jokes involving notions of authorship and translation.
December 3
Question:
Who initially buried the bulk of his unpublished poems with his wife Elizabeth Sidal?
Answer
Dante Gabriel Rossetti had his poems exhumed from his wife's grave seven years later in 1869.
December 2
Question:
Whose obsession with wombats was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's dormouse in Alice in Wonderland ?
Answer
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, for a while, obsessed with wombats. After visiting them regularly at the zoo, he eventually acquired two of his own. He even allowed one to sleep on his table's centerpice.
December 1
Question:
The son of what two poets was nicknamed "Pen"?
Answer
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning's marriage (after a two year epistolary romance) resulted in a son who was aptly named Robert "Pen" Browning.
November 30
Question:
Who failed his baccalaureate exam three times, but led the way in popularizing vers libre (free verse) through his poetry?
Answer
Though also found in the Bible and in Walt Whitman's poems, many Modernists held up Jules Laforgue as the model practitioner of free verse.
