Romanticism
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50 free Romanticism trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Romanticism was the moment European and American culture decided that feeling mattered as much as reason. Poets walked the hills and wrote about what they felt there, painters put storms and shipwrecks on vast canvases, and composers became celebrities whose concerts caused near riots. The movement gave us monsters, brooding heroes, haunted houses and the idea of the artist as a rebel. This quiz covers the whole movement: the English poets and their scandals, the American writers of the same era, the German and French authors who carried it across Europe, and the painters and composers who gave it a look and a sound. A few questions deal with the ideas behind it all, including where and when it began and what it was reacting against. It suits students revising an introduction to Romanticism or Romantic literature, book club readers, and anyone who likes knowing the story behind a famous poem or painting. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novel did Mary Shelley begin after a ghost-story challenge among friends at a villa near Geneva in 1816?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein grew out of a wet summer when the party stayed indoors reading German ghost stories aloud. Mary Shelley was 18 when she began it, and the book came out anonymously in 1818.
Q 02Which animal did Lord Byron keep as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the rules banned pet dogs?
A bear
A bear broke no rule, because the college statutes never mentioned one. Byron even suggested that he would apply for a college fellowship for it.
Q 03Which English Romantic poet qualified as an apothecary before dying of tuberculosis in Rome at just 25?
John Keats
John Keats asked for a gravestone with no name on it, only a line saying his name was written in water. His poems had been in print for less than four years.
Q 04Which French Romantic wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and published Les Misérables while exiled on Guernsey?
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo drew more than two million people to his funeral procession through Paris in 1885. His plays Cromwell and Hernani had put him at the front of the movement decades earlier.
Q 05Which composer, who wrote his Ninth Symphony while nearly deaf, led music from the Classical style into Romanticism?
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven never went totally deaf, and could still make out low tones and sudden loud sounds in his final years. The Ninth had its premiere in 1824.
Q 06Which Bavarian castle, a showpiece of Romanticism begun in 1869, inspired Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle?
Neuschwanstein
Neuschwanstein was ordered by a reclusive Bavarian king as a retreat and as a tribute to an opera composer he adored. Building work ran from 1869 to 1892.
Q 07Which German scholars, swept up in the Romantic love of folklore, published a famous book of fairy tales in 1812?
The Grimm brothers
The Grimm brothers started with 86 tales and kept revising until the collection passed 200. Cinderella, Rapunzel and Snow White all reached the wider world through their book.
Q 08Romanticism arose in Europe partly in reaction to which movement championed by Voltaire and Diderot?
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment held that reason alone could explain the world, and the Romantics answered that intuition and emotion matter too. They also recoiled from the factories of the industrial age.
Q 09Which American master of dark Romanticism published The Raven in 1845 and pioneered the detective story?
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe saw the poem become a sensation as soon as it appeared in a New York evening paper. The Mystery Writers of America named their awards the Edgars after him.
Q 10Which early American Romantic author created both Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow?
Washington Irving
Washington Irving also gave New York City its nickname Gotham, in a magazine piece of 1807. He wrote Rip Van Winkle overnight while staying with his sister in Birmingham, England.
Q 11Which 1847 novel by Emily Brontë sets the stormy bond of Catherine and Heathcliff on the Yorkshire moors?
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights was the only novel Emily Brontë wrote, and it first appeared under the pen name Ellis Bell. Its mix of love, possession and revenge draws heavily on Romanticism.
Q 12Which Herman Melville novel follows Captain Ahab's vengeful hunt for the white whale that took his leg?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick borrowed its ending from the real whaleship Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. Melville dedicated the book to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Q 13Which Nathaniel Hawthorne novel follows Hester Prynne, shamed in Puritan Boston for having a child outside marriage?
Q 21Which London engraver printed his own illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience and claimed to see angels?
William Blake
William Blake had sold fewer than 30 copies of the book by the time he died. He said that as a child he saw angels among the haystacks.
Q 22Which Edinburgh-born author of Waverley and Ivanhoe is credited with making the historical novel a Romantic genre?
Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott published Waverley anonymously, because he was already famous as a poet and the novel was a gamble. For nearly a century his novels were among the most widely read in Europe.
Q 23Which Scottish poet, regarded as a pioneer of Romanticism, wrote the words of Auld Lang Syne in 1788?
Robert Burns
The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter carries the subtitle A Romance, the label Hawthorne preferred for his fiction. Its Custom-House preface angered his neighbours in Salem.
Q 14Which book by Henry David Thoreau records two years of simple living in a cabin he built near Concord, Massachusetts?
Walden
Walden describes a retreat only about two miles from the Thoreau family home. His mother and sisters often came by with baskets of baked goods, pies and prepared meals.
Q 15Which Indonesian volcano's 1815 eruption caused the 'Year Without a Summer' that kept Mary Shelley writing indoors?
Tambora
Tambora erupted in April 1815 and brought a volcanic winter the next year. Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere, and incessant rain kept the Shelleys and Byron inside their Swiss villa.
Q 16In which country did Lord Byron die in 1824 after joining its war of independence against the Ottoman Empire?
Greece
Greece reveres Byron as a folk hero, and he spent 4,000 pounds of his own money refitting its fleet. He died of a fever at Missolonghi, aged 36.
Q 17Which flowers, seen beside Ullswater on a walk with his sister Dorothy, inspired William Wordsworth's best-known poem?
Daffodils
Daffodils grew in a long belt along the shore that day, and Dorothy's journal described them tossing and dancing in the wind. Her brother left her out of the poem altogether.
Q 18Which unfinished poem did Samuel Taylor Coleridge say came from an opium dream interrupted by a visitor from Porlock?
Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan sat unpublished for almost twenty years, read only to friends, until Lord Byron urged its author to print it in 1816. It pictures Xanadu, the summer capital of a Mongol emperor.
Q 19Which seabird does the sailor shoot in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, bringing a curse on his ship?
An albatross
An albatross around the neck became an English idiom for a heavy burden of guilt because of this poem. The angry crew force the mariner to wear the dead bird.
Q 20Which collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is widely seen as launching English Romanticism?
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads was mostly Wordsworth's work, with Coleridge supplying only four poems. The preface added in 1800 came to be known as the manifesto of the whole movement.
Robert Burns is toasted every 25 January at suppers held around the world. The night is more widely observed in Scotland than the official national day.
Q 24Which corner of England, home to William Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, lent its name to a circle of Romantic poets?
The Lake District
The Lake District gave the group a label that began as an insult from a hostile Edinburgh reviewer. Its three main figures were Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey.
Q 25Which university expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1811 over a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism?
Oxford
Oxford expelled him after he mailed the pamphlet to bishops and heads of colleges, then refused to say whether he wrote it. His co-author and closest friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, went too.
Q 26Which Egyptian pharaoh is the real ruler behind the shattered statue in Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias?
Ramesses II
Ramesses II was in the news because a huge fragment of one of his statues was on its way to Britain. Shelley wrote the sonnet in a friendly contest with the poet Horace Smith.
Q 27Which German writer's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men across Europe copying its hero's clothes?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 24 and finished the book in five and a half weeks. Leipzig banned both the novel and the Werther outfit the following year.
Q 28Which German Romantic author wrote the tale that became Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker?
E. T. A. Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann changed one of his own forenames to Amadeus in homage to Mozart. He was also a jurist and composer, and his eerie stories fed Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.
Q 29Which Geneva-born author of The Social Contract anticipated Romanticism with his novel Julie and reverence for nature?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the beauty of nature a spiritual value, an attitude the Romantics of the next century made their own. He held that uncorrupted morals prevail in the state of nature.
Q 30Which Russian poet of the Romantic era wrote Eugene Onegin and was fatally wounded in an 1837 duel?
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin faced a French officer rumoured to be his wife's lover. One of his great-grandfathers was Abram Gannibal, an African-born general raised at the court of Peter the Great.