Poetry Trivia
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100 free Poetry trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Poetry trivia questions with answers. Poetry trivia usually means one question about a rhyme scheme and one about who wrote The Raven. This quiz goes further. It covers the forms (sonnet, haiku, villanelle, limerick, blank verse, terza rima), the epics (Homer, Beowulf, Dante, Milton, Chaucer), the Romantics (Lyrical Ballads, Ozymandias, the person from Porlock), the Americans (Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Hughes, Plath, Angelou, Gorman), and the institutions: who was the first Poet Laureate, what comes with the job besides money, and which poet won the first Nobel Prize in Literature. Early questions suit anyone who did English at school (the 5-7-5 count, who guided Dante through Hell). Later ones will stretch English majors: how many lines the Iliad runs to, who Shelley was competing with when he wrote Ozymandias, and which magazine first printed 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'. Good for a literary pub quiz, a classroom warm-up or a book club. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the poems and poets, and each question shows its source. No poem is quoted beyond a title or a single word.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Shakespeare's 1609 sonnets open with a cryptic dedication to whom?
Mr. W.H.
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.
Q 02What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean (English) sonnet?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
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.
Q 03Of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, roughly how many were published in her lifetime?
About 10
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.
Q 04Emily Dickinson's poems are recognisable for slant rhyme, odd capitalisation and heavy use of which punctuation mark?
The dash
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.
Q 05Poe's 'The Raven' was inspired partly by a talking raven in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
Barnaby Rudge features the talking raven Grip; in reviewing the novel, Poe argued that the bird's croakings should have been prophetic.
Q 06In 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which classical goddess?
Pallas Athena
Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, is the 'pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door' where the raven sits repeating 'Nevermore'.
Q 07T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to which poet, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman)?
Ezra Pound
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.
Q 08Which Sanskrit word, repeated three times, ends The Waste Land?
Shantih
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.
Q 09A traditional Japanese haiku is composed of 17 sound units arranged in what pattern?
5-7-5
The 5-7-5 pattern of on (sound units) usually carries a seasonal word (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji).
Q 10Which Japanese poet wrote the famous haiku about a frog jumping into an old pond?
Matsuo Bashō
Matsuo Bashō perfected the form in the 17th century, when haiku was still the opening verse of longer collaborative renga poems.
Q 11Which poetic form has 19 lines, five tercets and a quatrain, with two alternating refrains?
Villanelle
The villanelle began as a free-form rustic song in Renaissance Italy and Spain and only later hardened into these fixed rules.
Q 12Which Dylan Thomas poem is thought to address his dying father?
Do not go gentle into that good night
'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.
Q 13Who was appointed Britain's first official Poet Laureate, by Charles II in 1668?
John Dryden
Q 21Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?
Blank verse
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'.
Q 22Which Italian writer first called Dante's Comedy 'divine', long before the word entered its title?
Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio praised it as divine in his 1350s life of Dante, and 'Divina' first appeared in the title in a 1555 Venice edition.
Q 23Who guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?
Virgil
Virgil must leave Dante at the Earthly Paradise because, as an unbaptised pagan from Limbo, he cannot enter Heaven.
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.
Q 14Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship?
A barrel of sherry
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.
Q 15Who in 2009 became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be UK Poet Laureate?
Carol Ann Duffy
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.
Q 16Which laureate holds the record for the longest tenure, 42 years from 1850 to 1892?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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.
Q 17Amanda Gorman, who read at Biden's 2021 inauguration, was the first person named to what post?
National Youth Poet Laureate
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.
Q 18The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to a poet from which country?
France
France's Sully Prudhomme, a poet and essayist, won the inaugural 1901 prize, a choice that dismayed admirers of Tolstoy, who was passed over.
Q 19Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel citation praised him for creating 'new poetic expressions' within what?
The great American song tradition
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.
Q 20How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose Paradise Lost?
He dictated it to helpers
He dictated it to helpers known as amanuenses, and the first edition of 1667 had ten books, reorganised into twelve in 1674.
Q 24Walt Whitman's self-published 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass contained how many poems?
12
Just 12 untitled poems made up the 1855 edition, and Whitman kept revising and expanding the book until his 1891–92 'deathbed edition'.
Q 25Whitman printed which writer's praise, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career', on his 1856 edition's spine?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Q 26Robert Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for which collection named after a US state?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire won Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize and includes 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' and 'Fire and Ice'.
Q 27Why did Robert Frost recite 'The Gift Outright' from memory at JFK's 1961 inauguration?
Sun glare on the page
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.
Q 28Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias' uses the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?
Ramesses II
Ramesses II inspired both Shelley's poem and a rival 'Ozymandias' by Horace Smith, written in a friendly contest over Christmas 1817.
Q 29Coleridge said he lost the rest of 'Kubla Khan' when interrupted by a visitor from where?
Porlock
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.
Q 30Which Irish Nobel laureate published a 1999 verse translation of Beowulf?
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, four years after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.