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 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.
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.
