100 Fun Facts About Poetry

Shakespeare's 1609 sonnets open with a cryptic dedication to whom?

Mr. W.H. is hailed as 'the onlie begetter' of the sonnets, and his identity is still debated, with William Herbert and Henry Wriothesley leading candidates.

What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean (English) sonnet?

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG bears Shakespeare's name, but Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, had established that form of three quatrains and a couplet decades before Shakespeare's sonnets.

Of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, roughly how many were published in her lifetime?

About 10 of Dickinson's poems appeared in print while she lived, anonymously and heavily edited, and her sister Lavinia found the rest after her death.

Emily Dickinson's poems are recognisable for slant rhyme, odd capitalisation and heavy use of which punctuation mark?

The dash is Dickinson's signature mark, standing in for commas and periods throughout her manuscripts; her 1890 editors regularised it to conventional punctuation, and scholarly editions later restored it.

Poe's 'The Raven' was inspired partly by a talking raven in which Charles Dickens novel?

Barnaby Rudge features the talking raven Grip; in reviewing the novel, Poe argued that the bird's croakings should have been prophetic.

In 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which classical goddess?

Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, is the 'pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door' where the raven sits repeating 'Nevermore'.

T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to which poet, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman)?

Ezra Pound cut the draft heavily, and Eliot's dedication 'il miglior fabbro' borrows Dante's tribute to the troubadour Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio.

Which Sanskrit word, repeated three times, ends The Waste Land?

Shantih, repeated three times, closes the poem; Eliot's own note glosses it as 'The Peace which passeth understanding', the formal ending of an Upanishad.

A traditional Japanese haiku is composed of 17 sound units arranged in what pattern?

The 5-7-5 pattern of on (sound units) usually carries a seasonal word (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji).

Which Japanese poet wrote the famous haiku about a frog jumping into an old pond?

Matsuo Bashō perfected the form in the 17th century, when haiku was still the opening verse of longer collaborative renga poems.

Which poetic form has 19 lines, five tercets and a quatrain, with two alternating refrains?

The villanelle began as a free-form rustic song in Renaissance Italy and Spain and only later hardened into these fixed rules.

Which Dylan Thomas poem is thought to address his dying father?

'Do not go gentle into that good night' first appeared in 1951 and ends by speaking to 'my father'; the poet's father, D. J. Thomas, died just before Christmas 1952.

Who was appointed Britain's first official Poet Laureate, by Charles II in 1668?

John Dryden received the first official appointment in 1668; Ben Jonson had drawn a royal pension from 1616 but held no formal title, and Dryden was dismissed in 1689 for refusing the oath to William and Mary.

Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship?

A barrel of sherry, historically a 'butt of sack', comes with the post; Andrew Motion took it in 1999 but broke with custom by serving a fixed ten-year term instead of for life.

Who in 2009 became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be UK Poet Laureate?

Carol Ann Duffy, born in Glasgow in 1955, held the post from 2009 to 2019, when Simon Armitage succeeded her; since Andrew Motion's 1999 appointment the laureateship has been a ten-year term, not a life post.

Which laureate holds the record for the longest tenure, 42 years from 1850 to 1892?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson served from 1850, after Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers's refusal, until his own death in 1892; Gray, Scott and Larkin also declined the post.

Amanda Gorman, who read at Biden's 2021 inauguration, was the first person named to what post?

National Youth Poet Laureate was a new post when Gorman was named to it in 2017; the day after her inauguration reading, her two forthcoming books topped Amazon's bestseller list.

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to a poet from which country?

France's Sully Prudhomme, a poet and essayist, won the inaugural 1901 prize, a choice that dismayed admirers of Tolstoy, who was passed over.

Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel citation praised him for creating 'new poetic expressions' within what?

The citation read 'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'; Dylan skipped the ceremony and delivered his Nobel lecture as a recording in June 2017.

How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose Paradise Lost?

He dictated it to helpers known as amanuenses, and the first edition of 1667 had ten books, reorganised into twelve in 1674.

Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?

Blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — carries the whole epic; Milton added a prefatory note defending 'ancient liberty' from 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming'.

Which Italian writer first called Dante's Comedy 'divine', long before the word entered its title?

Giovanni Boccaccio praised it as divine in his 1350s life of Dante, and 'Divina' first appeared in the title in a 1555 Venice edition.

Who guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?

Virgil must leave Dante at the Earthly Paradise because, as an unbaptised pagan from Limbo, he cannot enter Heaven.

Walt Whitman's self-published 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass contained how many poems?

Just 12 untitled poems made up the 1855 edition, and Whitman kept revising and expanding the book until his 1891–92 'deathbed edition'.

Whitman printed which writer's praise, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career', on his 1856 edition's spine?

Ralph Waldo Emerson had written the line in a private letter of thanks for the 1855 edition; Whitman stamped it in gold on the 1856 spine without asking, an early example of the book blurb.

Robert Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for which collection named after a US state?

New Hampshire won Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize and includes 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' and 'Fire and Ice'.

Why did Robert Frost recite 'The Gift Outright' from memory at JFK's 1961 inauguration?

Sun glare on the page kept Frost from reading his new poem; reciting 'The Gift Outright' instead, he changed its last line to 'what she will become', as Kennedy had asked.

Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias' uses the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?

Ramesses II inspired both Shelley's poem and a rival 'Ozymandias' by Horace Smith, written in a friendly contest over Christmas 1817.

Coleridge said he lost the rest of 'Kubla Khan' when interrupted by a visitor from where?

Porlock is where the interrupting 'person on business' came from in Coleridge's 1816 preface, which blames him for scattering the opium-dream vision; Byron urged the poem's publication.

Which Irish Nobel laureate published a 1999 verse translation of Beowulf?

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, four years after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Whose 1936 lecture to the British Academy is often said to mark the start of modern Beowulf criticism?

J. R. R. Tolkien's lecture 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' argued for reading the poem as a work of art rather than a historical quarry, putting the monsters at its centre.

What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?

AABBA: the first, second and fifth lines share one rhyme and the shorter middle pair another; Edward Lear popularised the form in his 1846 Book of Nonsense without ever calling them limericks.

The Greek poet Sappho, of whom only about 650 lines survive, came from which island?

Lesbos, Sappho's home island, gave English the word 'lesbian' through her poems of love for women, and antiquity called her the Tenth Muse.

Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' first appeared in 1921 in which magazine?

The Crisis, the NAACP magazine, printed it in June 1921; Hughes had written the poem while crossing the Mississippi, and it reappeared in The Weary Blues (1926).

Which poet read 'Praise Song for the Day' at Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration?

Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem drew a cool reception: critics called it too prosaic, and Adam Kirsch called it bureaucratic.

Homer's Iliad is written in which metre?

Dactylic hexameter, six feet of long-short-short (or long-long) syllables, is the epic metre of both Homeric poems; the Iliad's 24 books cover only weeks of the war's final year and never mention the Trojan Horse.

What prize awaited the winner of the storytelling contest in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

A free dinner, paid for by the other pilgrims, was the Host's prize; Chaucer planned about 120 tales but left only 24, some of them unfinished.

Which 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collection is considered the start of English Romanticism?

Lyrical Ballads gained a Preface in its 1800 edition, where Wordsworth argued for poetry written in the everyday language people really use.

Who published the famous 1859 English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?

Edward FitzGerald issued his translation of the Persian quatrains in 1859; it sold almost nothing until the Pre-Raphaelites took it up.

Under what pseudonym did Sylvia Plath publish her only novel, The Bell Jar, in 1963?

Victoria Lucas was the name on the 1963 British edition, and Plath's mother tried to block the novel, which reached US readers only in 1971.

Roughly how many lines does Homer's Iliad contain in its standard edition?

About 16,000 lines fill the Iliad's 24 books, yet the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the Trojan War.

Which poet first read 'Howl' aloud at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955?

Allen Ginsberg premiered 'Howl' at the Six Gallery reading in October 1955; City Lights Books published it in 1956 and won the 1957 obscenity trial brought over it.

The word 'poetry' shares its Greek root with 'poiesis', which means what?

Making is the sense of poiesis, from the verb poiein, 'to make'; on the same logic Scots poets were for centuries called 'makars'.

The standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was written in which language?

Akkadian is the language of the standard version's flood tablet, and George Smith's translation of it, so like the story of Noah, caused a public sensation.

A tanka has 31 sound units arranged in what pattern?

5-7-5-7-7 gives 31 on across five units, the classic waka shape; by the tenth-century Kokinshu anthology it had become so dominant that 'waka' effectively meant tanka.

Which Persian poet's collected ghazals are opened at random in Iranian homes to tell fortunes?

Hafez's Divan is Iran's most popular book for this divination, called fal-e Hafez, and his tomb in Shiraz still draws visitors reciting his verses.

What are the three parts of a classical ode, as developed by Pindar?

Strophe, antistrophe and epode mirror the chorus's movements — one way, back again, then standing.

Which English poet wrote 'The Tyger', with its famous line about 'fearful symmetry'?

William Blake printed 'The Tyger' in Songs of Experience as a partner to 'The Lamb', engraving and hand-colouring each copy himself.

The poetry slam was born in the 1980s in which US city, home of the Green Mill jazz club?

Chicago's Green Mill has hosted Marc Kelly Smith's Uptown Poetry Slam since 1986, after the show began at the Get Me High Lounge.

Poe's 1848 'prose poem' Eureka is credited with anticipating which scientific theory?

The Big Bang is foreshadowed in Eureka's vision of a universe bursting from a single 'primordial particle' and later collapsing back; Poe also offered a resolution of Olbers' paradox about the dark night sky.

Poets could win gold medals from 1912 to 1948 at which international event, alongside painters and sculptors?

The Olympic Games gave art medals for works inspired by sport, and founder Pierre de Coubertin won the 1912 literature gold under a pseudonym. The contests ended because most entrants were professionals.

Which children's poet behind 'Where the Sidewalk Ends' also wrote the Johnny Cash hit 'A Boy Named Sue'?

Shel Silverstein won a Grammy for the song in 1970. He started out as a cartoonist, drawing for the adult magazine Playboy years before 'The Giving Tree' made him a children's favourite.

Which nursery rhyme, published by Sarah Josepha Hale, was the first thing Thomas Edison recorded on his phonograph?

Mary Had a Little Lamb was what Edison recited in 1877 to test his new machine. Hale, who published the poem in 1830, later led the campaign to make Thanksgiving a US national holiday.

Which mathematician, often called the first computer programmer, was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron?

Ada Lovelace was taught mathematics from an early age because her mother feared she might inherit her father's 'insanity'. She called her own approach to numbers 'poetical science'.

Two lines from Rudyard Kipling's poem 'If—' greet tennis players above the entrance to the main court at which venue?

Wimbledon greets players with 'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same' on the way to Centre Court. Kipling framed the poem as a father's advice to his son.

Which Robert Frost poem began as a joke about a friend who dithered over every route on their country walks?

The Road Not Taken teased the writer Edward Thomas, who always wished the pair had gone the other way. Thomas took the poem to heart, and it may have nudged him to enlist in the First World War.

Which famous storybook bear debuted as 'Mr. Edward Bear' in the poem 'Teddy Bear', printed in Punch magazine?

Winnie-the-Pooh grew out of that poem, which A. A. Milne collected in his verse book When We Were Very Young. The first book of stories followed two years later.

Which Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, read by Alice in mirror writing, gave English the words 'chortle' and 'galumphing'?

Jabberwocky also coined 'vorpal' and 'frabjous'. Humpty Dumpty later explains its strange words to Alice as portmanteaus, with two meanings packed into one word.

T. S. Eliot's poems about Macavity and Mr. Mistoffelees, written for his godchildren, became which hit musical?

Cats opened in London in 1981 and became the longest-running show in Broadway history until The Phantom of the Opera overtook it. Eliot signed the poems 'Old Possum' in his letters.

Emma Lazarus wrote the poem 'The New Colossus' to raise money for the pedestal of which American monument?

The Statue of Liberty has carried the poem on a bronze plaque inside its pedestal since 1903. Its best-known line is 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'.

Which flower became a worldwide symbol of remembrance because of John McCrae's wartime poem 'In Flanders Fields'?

Poppy flowers grew over the soldiers' graves in the poem. McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, wrote it after presiding over the funeral of a friend killed at Ypres in 1915.

Which lakeside flowers inspired William Wordsworth's poem 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' after a walk with his sister?

Daffodils appear first in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, as 'a long belt of them along the shore' of Ullswater. The poet's wife Mary supplied what he later called the two best lines in the poem.

Walt Whitman's poem 'O Captain! My Captain!' mourns the death of which American president, whom the poet never met?

Abraham Lincoln is the captain who dies just as his ship reaches port. It was Whitman's most popular poem in his lifetime, and he later said he was almost sorry he ever wrote it.

Which Greek king of Ithaca spends ten years sailing home from the Trojan War in Homer's second great epic?

Odysseus loses every one of his crewmates on the voyage. He gets home to find 108 suitors camped in his palace, all competing to marry his wife Penelope.

In Edward Lear's nonsense poem, the Owl and the Pussy-cat go to sea in a beautiful boat of which colour?

Pea-green is the boat, and the couple later dine with a 'runcible spoon', a word Lear invented for the poem. He wrote it for a friend's three-year-old daughter.

Francis Scott Key's poem 'Defence of Fort M'Henry' was set to a London gentlemen's club tune to become which song?

The Star-Spangled Banner only became the official US national anthem in 1931, when Herbert Hoover signed it into law. Key wrote the words after watching British ships bombard the fort in 1814.

In Ernest Thayer's baseball poem 'Casey at the Bat', there is no joy in which town after the slugger strikes out?

Mudville's team is two runs down in the last inning when Casey swings and misses. Thayer published the poem in a San Francisco newspaper under the pen name 'Phin'.

Emily Dickinson called which feeling 'the thing with feathers' that 'perches in the soul' and never stops singing?

Hope, in the poem, is a small bird that keeps singing through the worst storm and never asks for a crumb in return. Dickinson stitched it into one of her hand-sewn booklets around 1861.

In Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', which seabird does the sailor shoot with a crossbow, cursing his ship?

An albatross is hung around the mariner's neck by his angry crew. That is why a burden or guilt someone cannot shake off is still called an albatross.

Which Scottish poet wrote 'Auld Lang Syne' and the poem about a mouse that gave John Steinbeck a novel title?

Robert Burns is said to have composed 'To a Mouse' after wrecking a nest with his plough. Its line about the best laid schemes 'o' mice an' men' gave Steinbeck the title Of Mice and Men.

Which poet of 'Still I Rise' became the first Black woman to be depicted on a United States quarter?

Maya Angelou's coin was released in 2022 as part of the American Women quarters series. In 1993 she had recited 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's inauguration.

Which rapper wrote the poems published three years after his death as 'The Rose That Grew from Concrete'?

Tupac Shakur wrote the poems between 1989 and 1991, before he was famous. His mother Afeni wrote the preface, and the collection came out through MTV's book imprint.

Which Latin phrase from the Roman poet Horace does teacher John Keating urge on his class in Dead Poets Society?

Carpe diem is usually translated 'seize the day', but the Latin verb literally means to pick or pluck. Horace wrote the line more than 2,000 years ago, in 23 BC.

Geoffrey Chaucer, buried in 1400, was the first poet laid to rest in Poets' Corner, a part of which London church?

Westminster Abbey probably buried Chaucer less as a poet than as a royal servant who died in a house he leased in its grounds. The custom of burying writers nearby began with Edmund Spenser two centuries later.

Which month, right after Women's History Month, has been National Poetry Month in the United States since 1996?

April was picked by the Academy of American Poets, which modelled the event on Black History Month and Women's History Month. Canada began celebrating it two years later.

In a short Carl Sandburg poem, what 'comes on little cat feet' and sits looking over harbor and city?

The fog struck Sandburg while he waited forty minutes to interview a judge. He was carrying a book of Japanese haiku and scribbled his own 'American haiku' on a scrap of newsprint.

Which Lorraine Hansberry play takes its title from Langston Hughes's poem about what happens to a dream deferred?

A Raisin in the Sun borrows the poem's image of a dream that might 'dry up like a raisin in the sun'. In 1959 it became the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway.

Which Canadian songwriter was a published poet and novelist for a decade before starting a music career in his thirties?

Leonard Cohen published his first poetry book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. His first album arrived in 1967, and 'Hallelujah' followed in the 1980s.

In Edgar Allan Poe's last complete poem, which young woman lived 'in a kingdom by the sea'?

Annabel Lee is often assumed to be inspired by Poe's wife Virginia, who died young. He wrote the poem in 1849, and it was only published shortly after his own death that year.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning disguised the love sonnets she wrote for her husband as translations from which language?

Portuguese was Robert Browning's suggestion, probably a nod to his pet name for her, 'my little Portuguese'. She had first planned to call the poems 'Sonnets translated from the Bosnian'.

In William Carlos Williams's 16-word poem, 'so much depends upon' which red object 'glazed with rain water'?

A wheelbarrow in a neighbour's back yard, 'beside the white chickens', is all the poem shows. Williams was a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, and the neighbour, Thaddeus Marshall, was only identified in 2015.

Which Romantic poet, who died in Rome at 25, has a tombstone that says his name was 'writ in Water'?

John Keats trained as a surgeon before giving up medicine for poetry. His last request was a stone with no name or date, only the words 'Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water'.

Which William Ernest Henley poem, ending 'I am the captain of my soul', did Nelson Mandela recite to fellow prisoners?

Invictus, Latin for 'unconquered', was written in a hospital bed. Henley had already lost one leg to tuberculosis, and wrote it while the surgeon Joseph Lister fought to save the other.

Friedrich Schiller's poem 'Ode to Joy' is sung in the choral finale of which composer's Ninth Symphony?

Ludwig van Beethoven's tune is now the anthem of the European Union, played without the words. Schiller himself came to see the poem as a failure, calling it 'detached from reality'.

Which man-eating monster does the hero Beowulf kill bare-handed by tearing off its arm in the mead hall Heorot?

Grendel's mother then attacks the hall in revenge, and Beowulf kills her too, using a giant's sword that he finds in her lair.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dream poem, the emperor Kubla Khan decrees 'a stately pleasure-dome' in which place?

Xanadu was real: Shangdu, the summer capital of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, in what is now Inner Mongolia. Coleridge said the lines came to him in an opium dream after reading about the city.

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were leading writers of which cultural movement of the 1920s?

The Harlem Renaissance drew Black writers, artists and musicians to one New York neighbourhood. In 1926 Hughes wrote that its young artists meant 'to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame'.

In Lewis Carroll's poem 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', which shellfish are coaxed along the beach and then eaten?

Oysters follow the pair for 'a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk', and the Walrus sobs into his handkerchief while picking out the biggest. Tweedledum and Tweedledee recite the poem to Alice.

Which Chilean poet of 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair' befriends a postman in the film Il Postino?

Pablo Neruda was a pen name, thought to be borrowed from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971 and once read to 70,000 people in Chile's national stadium.

Which Sanskrit epic of ancient India runs to roughly ten times the length of Homer's two epics put together?

The Mahabharata runs to about 1.8 million words and tells of a war of succession between two sets of princely cousins. The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text for Hindus, is one section of it.

The pilgrims of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales ride to the shrine of which archbishop, murdered in his own cathedral?

Thomas Becket was killed in 1170 by four knights loyal to King Henry II. His jewelled shrine drew pilgrims for three centuries, until Henry VIII had it destroyed and the bones with it.

Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart takes its title from 'The Second Coming', a poem by which Irish poet?

W. B. Yeats wrote 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War. Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem borrows from the same poem's last line.

Which soldier-poet of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' was killed in action one week before the 1918 Armistice?

Wilfred Owen's mother got the telegram about his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing in celebration. The poem calls its Latin title, about dying sweetly for your country, 'the old Lie'.

Enheduanna, a priestess often called the earliest author known by name, lived about 4,300 years ago in which region?

Mesopotamia's city of Ur was her home, where she served as high priestess of the moon god. Her name was lost until 1927, when archaeologists digging there found an alabaster disk that bore it.

Which of the nine Greek Muses presides over epic poetry and was sometimes named as Homer's own inspiration?

Calliope was called 'Chief of all Muses' by Hesiod and Ovid, and her sons included the musician Orpheus. The steam-whistle organ once played on riverboats and at circuses borrows her name.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood trial for obscenity in 1957 after which San Francisco bookshop of his published 'Howl'?

City Lights had opened four years earlier as the first all-paperback bookshop in the United States. The judge ruled that the poem was not obscene, and the trial made the shop famous.

Which poet of 'We Real Cool' became in 1950 the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize?

Gwendolyn Brooks said the poem came to her on a walk through her neighbourhood, as she passed a pool hall full of boys. It appeared in her 1960 book The Bean Eaters.

Which Bengali poet, the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize, wrote the national anthems of two countries?

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the anthems of India and Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka's was inspired by his work. He renounced his British knighthood in protest after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Which Russian poet, fatally shot in a duel with his brother-in-law, wrote the verse novel Eugene Onegin?

Alexander Pushkin had written the same fate into Eugene Onegin, whose hero kills a young poet in a duel. His great-grandfather was Abram Gannibal, an African-born general raised at Peter the Great's court.

Longfellow's poem beginning 'Listen, my children, and you shall hear' made a legend of which Boston patriot?

Paul Revere never finished the ride in real life: a British patrol stopped him on the road to Concord. Two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, got away.