50 free Poetry trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many sonnets did Shakespeare publish in the 1609 quarto?
154
The first 126 address a young man, the rest a woman; the mysterious dedication is to 'Mr. W.H.'
Q 02What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean (English) sonnet?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
Three quatrains and a closing couplet, in iambic pentameter.
Q 03Of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, roughly how many were published in her lifetime?
10
Her sister Lavinia found the rest in a desk after her death in 1886; the first, heavily edited collection appeared in 1890.
Q 04Emily Dickinson's poems are recognisable for slant rhyme, odd capitalisation and heavy use of which punctuation mark?
The dash
Her 1890 editors regularised her punctuation to 19th-century norms; scholarly editions restored it.
Q 05Poe's 'The Raven' was inspired partly by a talking raven in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
Poe sold the poem for $9; it made him famous but, as he complained, no money. The Baltimore Ravens are named for it.
Q 06In 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which classical goddess?
Pallas Athena
The narrator mourns his lost Lenore; the poem's metre is trochaic octameter, eight feet per line.
Q 07T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to which poet, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman)?
Ezra Pound
He had allowed his friend a high degree of control over the final shape of the 434-line poem.
Q 08The Waste Land ends with a Sanskrit word repeated three times, the formal ending of an Upanishad. What is it?
Shantih
Eliot drafted parts of the poem in a seaside shelter at Margate and finished it during treatment in Lausanne.
Q 09A traditional Japanese haiku is composed of 17 sound units arranged in what pattern?
5-7-5
It also usually carries a seasonal word (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji); Basho himself sometimes ignored the count.
Q 10Which late 19th-century Japanese writer gave the haiku its name, replacing the older 'hokku'?
Masaoka Shiki
The hokku had originally been the opening stanza of a longer collaborative form called renga.
Q 11How many lines does a villanelle have?
19
Five tercets and a closing quatrain, built on two rhymes and two refrains.
Q 12Which Dylan Thomas poem to his dying father is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all?
Do not go gentle into that good night
Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' is the other famous modern example; the form began with a 1606 French poem by Jean Passerat.
Q 13Who was appointed Britain's first official Poet Laureate, by Charles II in 1668?
John Dryden
Ben Jonson had drawn a royal pension from 1616, but Dryden's was the first formal appointment.
Q 21Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter: Milton added a note defending the absence of rhyme.
Q 22Dante's Comedy is made up of how many cantos across Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso?
100
It is written in terza rima in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, and Boccaccio was the first to call it 'Divine'.
Q 23Who guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?
Virgil
Saint Bernard, not Beatrice, escorts him through the final cantos of Paradise.
Q 24Walt Whitman's first, self-published edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 contained how many poems?
Q 14Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship, alongside a £5,750 stipend?
A barrel of sherry
Ted Hughes took his as 720 bottles; the custom dates back to a 'butt of Canary wine'.
Q 15Who in 2009 became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be UK Poet Laureate?
Carol Ann Duffy
Simon Armitage succeeded her in 2019; since Andrew Motion in 1999 the post has been a ten-year term rather than for life.
Q 16Which laureate holds the record for the longest tenure, 42 years from 1850 to 1892?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Thomas Gray, Samuel Rogers, Walter Scott and Philip Larkin all turned the job down.
Q 17Amanda Gorman, who read at Biden's 2021 inauguration, was the first person named to what post?
National Youth Poet Laureate
Weeks later she became the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl.
Q 18The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to a poet from which country?
France
Sully Prudhomme was a poet and essayist; Boris Pasternak accepted in 1958 and was then forced by the Soviet authorities to decline.
Q 19Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel citation praised him for creating 'new poetic expressions' within what?
The great American song tradition
He had already received a Pulitzer special citation in 2008.
Q 20How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose the ten-thousand-plus lines of Paradise Lost?
He dictated it to helpers
The 1667 first edition had ten books; the 1674 revision rearranged it into twelve.
12
By the 1891-92 'deathbed edition' it had grown to nearly 400; Whitman set some of the type himself.
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
It is often called the first modern book blurb; the book also cost Whitman his job at the Interior Department.
Q 26Robert Frost is the only poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry how many times?
Four
His first book, A Boy's Will, was published not in America but in London in 1913, while he was living in England.
Q 27Why did Robert Frost recite 'The Gift Outright' from memory at JFK's 1961 inauguration?
Sun glare stopped him reading the page
The unread poem was 'Dedication'; Frost was 86.
Q 28Which banker-writer published a rival sonnet in friendly competition with Shelley's 'Ozymandias'?
Horace Smith
Both were anticipating the arrival in London of the Younger Memnon, a colossal statue fragment of Ramesses II.
Q 29Coleridge said he lost the rest of 'Kubla Khan' when interrupted by a visitor from where?
Porlock
He claimed the poem came to him in an opium reverie; Byron persuaded him to publish it in 1816.
Q 30Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in which year?
1731
The Old English epic runs to 3,182 alliterative lines; Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation became a bestseller.