50 Fun Facts About Poetry

How many sonnets did Shakespeare publish in the 1609 quarto?

The first 126 address a young man, the rest a woman; the mysterious dedication is to 'Mr. W.H.'

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

Three quatrains and a closing couplet, in iambic pentameter.

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

Her sister Lavinia found the rest in a desk after her death in 1886; the first, heavily edited collection appeared in 1890.

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

Her 1890 editors regularised her punctuation to 19th-century norms; scholarly editions restored it.

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

Poe sold the poem for $9; it made him famous but, as he complained, no money. The Baltimore Ravens are named for it.

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

The narrator mourns his lost Lenore; the poem's metre is trochaic octameter, eight feet per line.

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

He had allowed his friend a high degree of control over the final shape of the 434-line poem.

The Waste Land ends with a Sanskrit word repeated three times, the formal ending of an Upanishad. What is it?

Eliot drafted parts of the poem in a seaside shelter at Margate and finished it during treatment in Lausanne.

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

It also usually carries a seasonal word (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji); Basho himself sometimes ignored the count.

Which late 19th-century Japanese writer gave the haiku its name, replacing the older 'hokku'?

The hokku had originally been the opening stanza of a longer collaborative form called renga.

How many lines does a villanelle have?

Five tercets and a closing quatrain, built on two rhymes and two refrains.

Which Dylan Thomas poem to his dying father is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all?

Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' is the other famous modern example; the form began with a 1606 French poem by Jean Passerat.

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

Ben Jonson had drawn a royal pension from 1616, but Dryden's was the first formal appointment.

Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship, alongside a £5,750 stipend?

Ted Hughes took his as 720 bottles; the custom dates back to a 'butt of Canary wine'.

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

Simon Armitage succeeded her in 2019; since Andrew Motion in 1999 the post has been a ten-year term rather than for life.

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

Thomas Gray, Samuel Rogers, Walter Scott and Philip Larkin all turned the job down.

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

Weeks later she became the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl.

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

Sully Prudhomme was a poet and essayist; Boris Pasternak accepted in 1958 and was then forced by the Soviet authorities to decline.

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

He had already received a Pulitzer special citation in 2008.

How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose the ten-thousand-plus lines of Paradise Lost?

The 1667 first edition had ten books; the 1674 revision rearranged it into twelve.

Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?

Unrhymed iambic pentameter: Milton added a note defending the absence of rhyme.

Dante's Comedy is made up of how many cantos across Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso?

It is written in terza rima in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, and Boccaccio was the first to call it 'Divine'.

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

Saint Bernard, not Beatrice, escorts him through the final cantos of Paradise.

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

By the 1891-92 'deathbed edition' it had grown to nearly 400; Whitman set some of the type himself.

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

It is often called the first modern book blurb; the book also cost Whitman his job at the Interior Department.

Robert Frost is the only poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry how many times?

His first book, A Boy's Will, was published not in America but in London in 1913, while he was living in England.

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

The unread poem was 'Dedication'; Frost was 86.

Which banker-writer published a rival sonnet in friendly competition with Shelley's 'Ozymandias'?

Both were anticipating the arrival in London of the Younger Memnon, a colossal statue fragment of Ramesses II.

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

He claimed the poem came to him in an opium reverie; Byron persuaded him to publish it in 1816.

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in which year?

The Old English epic runs to 3,182 alliterative lines; Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation became a bestseller.

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

He argued for reading the poem as literature rather than as a historical quarry.

What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?

Edward Lear popularised the form with his 1846 Book of Nonsense, though he never called them limericks.

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

Only the 'Ode to Aphrodite' is certainly complete; antiquity called her the Tenth Muse.

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

It reappeared in his first book, The Weary Blues (1926); his ashes lie under a floor medallion at Harlem's Schomburg Center.

Angelou's 1993 'On the Pulse of Morning' made her the first inaugural poet in how many years?

The last had been Robert Frost at Kennedy's 1961 swearing-in; as a child Angelou was mute for almost five years.

Homer's Iliad is written in which metre?

Its 24 books cover only the final weeks of the Trojan War, and it never mentions the Trojan Horse.

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

Chaucer planned about 120 tales but completed 24; the pilgrims were bound for Thomas Becket's shrine.

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

It opens with 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and closes with 'Tintern Abbey'; it was published anonymously.

Plath's 1982 Pulitzer for Collected Poems made her which numbered posthumous recipient?

Her breakthrough collection Ariel appeared in 1965, two years after her death in London.

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

She married Ted Hughes in 1956, four months after they met, and is credited with advancing confessional poetry.

Roughly how many lines does the Iliad contain in its standard edition?

Scholars date it to the late eighth century BC; it is often called the first substantial work of European literature.

Which word, borrowed from Sappho's home island, entered English through her association with it?

'Sapphic' comes directly from her name, and the Sapphic stanza is named for her too.

The word 'poetry' comes from the Greek 'poiesis', which means what?

Poets have been seen as 'makers' of language, shaping its expressive qualities.

The earliest surviving Western Asian epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in which language?

Some of the oldest written poetry in Africa appears in Egypt's Pyramid Texts of the 25th century BCE.

A tanka has 31 sound units arranged in what pattern?

The form dates to the Asuka period and by the tenth century had become so dominant that 'waka' came to mean tanka alone.

In classic form, a ghazal consists of how many rhyming couplets sharing a refrain?

Rumi, Attar and Hafez were masters of the form, which often reflects on unattainable love or the divine.

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

The strophe and antistrophe examine a subject from conflicting angles, and the epode resolves or elevates it.

Which Thai poetic form relies on tone marks called mai ek and mai tho on certain syllables?

The rules likely date from when Thai had three tones rather than today's five.

Who organised the first poetry slam, in Chicago in 1986?

Slam poets perform aloud before an audience, often competitively, focusing on wordplay and vocal inflection.

Poe's 1848 'prose poem' Eureka is credited with anticipating which scientific theory by 75 years?

The much-derided essay earned Poe a reputation as the 'father of speculative poetry'.