Poetry Trivia Questions
In case you missed them, here are the past five Columbia Granger's World of Poetry trivia questions of the day. You can also receive our poetry
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October 19
October 18
Question:
In which poem did Gerard Manley Hopkins first use his sprung rhythm?
Answer
In order to avoid the repetitions in running rhythm (or traditional meters), Hopkins drew on older literary traditions like Beowulf for his unmetered but still accentual verse, which he called sprung rhythm. The first poem to use this sprung rhythm is "The Wreck of the Deutschland", written in 1875.
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.
