Romantic Poets Trivia
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50 free Romantic Poets trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The English Romantic poets rebelled against the tidy, reasoned verse of the 18th century and wrote instead about feeling, imagination, nature and the sublime. Wordsworth and Coleridge launched the movement with Lyrical Ballads in 1798; Blake was already printing his own illuminated books in London; and the second generation of Byron, Shelley and Keats burned out young in Italy and Greece, leaving some of the most quoted lines in the language. This quiz mixes the poems with the lives. You will need to know who shot the albatross, who was interrupted by a person from Porlock, which pharaoh stands behind Ozymandias and what Keats asked to have carved on his grave. You will also need the biographies: the club foot, the opium, the expulsion from Oxford, the boat that went down in a storm, the villa on Lake Geneva where Frankenstein began, and the Greek town where Byron died. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. The easy tier is school-syllabus material; the expert tier goes into pen names, pamphlets and the poets' grandfathers.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote the poem 'She Walks in Beauty'?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron wrote it in 1814 after seeing his cousin's wife at a London party, dressed in mourning with spangles on her gown.
Q 02Shelley's second wife, Mary, wrote which novel?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein began in 1816 as her answer to Lord Byron's challenge that each of his guests write a ghost story; she was 18 at the time.
Q 03Which bird does the Ancient Mariner shoot?
Albatross
Albatross: the crew hang the dead bird round the Mariner's neck, which gave English the phrase 'an albatross around one's neck' for a burden of guilt.
Q 04Who wrote 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'To a Skylark'?
Percy Shelley
Percy Shelley wrote the West Wind ode in Florence in autumn 1819, using the storm-bringing wind as an image of the political change he hoped was coming.
Q 05Who wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?
John Keats
John Keats, his housemate Charles Brown recalled, wrote the nightingale ode in a single spring morning, sitting under a plum tree in their Hampstead garden.
Q 06Who wrote 'The Tyger' and Songs of Innocence?
William Blake
William Blake later paired Songs of Innocence with darker companion poems, Songs of Experience, to show what he called 'the two contrary states of the human soul'.
Q 07Wordsworth is associated with which English region?
Lake District
The Lake District was where he was born and spent most of his life, and besides the poems he wrote a travellers' guidebook to its scenery.
Q 08Which 1798 collection is generally said to have begun English Romanticism?
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads broke with ornate verse: the preface added to its 1800 edition argued that poetry should be written in 'the real language of men'.
Q 09Which poet co-wrote with Coleridge the 1798 collection that launched English Romanticism?
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth wrote most of its poems, ending the book with 'Tintern Abbey', composed after a walking tour of the Wye valley with his sister.
Q 10Who wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned it as a poem to sell to a magazine, to help pay for a walking tour over Somerset's Quantock Hills in November 1797.
Q 11Keats died at 25 of which disease?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis had already killed his brother Tom, whom Keats nursed; trained in medicine, he saw his own first cough of blood and called it his 'death warrant'.
Q 12How did Shelley die in 1822?
Drowned in a boating accident
Drowned in a boating accident: a squall overwhelmed his new sailing boat off the Italian coast, and his body, washed ashore ten days later, was cremated on the beach.
Q 13Coleridge struggled for most of his life with addiction to which drug?
Opium
Opium, usually taken as laudanum, was first given to him as medicine, and he said 'Kubla Khan' came to him in a sleep brought on by a dose.
Q 21Besides poetry, Blake worked professionally in which trade?
Engraving
Engraving was his living: apprenticed at 14 to the engraver James Basire, he later devised his own relief-etching method to print his poems and pictures together.
Q 22Byron attended which university?
Cambridge
Cambridge: at Trinity College he kept a pet bear, reputedly because the rules that banned dogs said nothing about bears.
Q 23What is generally considered Wordsworth's magnum opus?
The Prelude
The Prelude was published only after his death in 1850, and it was his widow who gave it that title; he had called it simply the poem to Coleridge.
Q 14Byron died in 1824 after joining which conflict?
Greek War of Independence
Greek War of Independence: he put 4,000 pounds of his own money into the Greek fleet, died of fever at Missolonghi, and was mourned in memorial services across Greece.
Q 15Keats died in which city in 1821?
Rome
Rome was where his doctors sent him in hope of a warmer climate; he arrived in November 1820 and died there three months later, nursed by the painter Joseph Severn.
Q 16Romantic poetry was a reaction against which earlier style?
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism prized order, balance and reason on classical models; the Romantics answered with emotion, imagination and the individual.
Q 17Wordsworth defined poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful' what?
Feelings
Feelings, though not raw ones: the same sentence of his 1800 preface says poetry 'takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity'.
Q 18Which woman of science was Byron's daughter?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace never knew him: her mother left with her weeks after the birth, and within months Byron had sailed from England, never to return.
Q 19Byron said 'I awoke one morning and found myself' what?
Famous
Famous was the word: the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had just appeared in March 1812, and the first printing sold out in three days.
Q 20What was the name of Wordsworth's sister, the diarist?
Dorothy
Dorothy kept a journal at Grasmere, and her entry on the daffodils the pair saw beside Ullswater in April 1802 fed his best-known poem.
Q 24To whom does the Ancient Mariner tell his tale?
A wedding guest
A wedding guest, stopped on his way in to the feast, is held by the old sailor's 'glittering eye' and goes home 'a sadder and a wiser man'.
Q 25Who was Keats's fiancée, to whom he wrote his love letters?
Fanny Brawne
Fanny Brawne lived in the other half of his Hampstead house; when he sailed for Italy in 1820, he knew he would probably never see her again.
Q 26Byron's Villa Diodati, scene of the 1816 ghost-story contest, overlooked which lake?
Lake Geneva
Lake Geneva: kept indoors by the incessant rain of 1816, the 'year without a summer', the party read German ghost stories aloud and set out to write their own.
Q 27Byron was born with what physical condition?
A deformed foot
A deformed foot left him lame, and he made up for it with boxing and swimming, crossing the Hellespont itself in 1810.
Q 28Which Blake poem became the words of the hymn 'Jerusalem'?
And did those feet in ancient time
'And did those feet in ancient time' comes from the preface to his long poem Milton, not from his poem called Jerusalem; Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916.
Q 29Who is said to have called Byron 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'?
Lady Caroline Lamb
Lady Caroline Lamb is said to have coined the phrase soon after meeting him in 1812; when their affair ended, she turned him into the villain of her novel Glenarvon.
Q 30Which critical phrase did Coleridge coin?
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief comes from his Biographia Literaria of 1817, where he explained how readers could accept the supernatural in his poems for a moment of 'poetic faith'.