Wallace Stevens
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50 free Wallace Stevens trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wallace Stevens led one of the strangest double lives in American letters. By day he was a corporate executive in a Connecticut office; in his spare hours he wrote some of the most admired poems of the twentieth century, most of them after he turned forty. He argued with rivals, threw a punch at a famous novelist and turned down a professorship to stay at his desk. This quiz gives special attention to Sunday Morning, the early meditation in which a woman stays home from church and wonders whether earthly pleasure can stand in for heaven. You will be asked about its images, its form, how it first reached print and what its author said about it. Other questions cover the jar on the hill, the blue guitar, the emperor of ice cream, his prizes, his friendships and his family. It suits students revising American poetry, book-club readers and anyone who has met a Stevens poem in an anthology and wants the stories behind it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novelist knocked Wallace Stevens down in a 1936 fistfight in Key West, leaving the poet with a broken hand?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway floored the poet repeatedly outside a Key West party after Stevens swung first. Stevens broke his hand on his opponent's jaw and later apologized.
Q 02Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie is thought to have modelled for which American coin designed by sculptor Adolph Weinman?
Mercury dime
The Mercury dime may carry Elsie's profile because Weinman was the couple's New York landlord and sculpted a bust of her. The same face is linked to his Walking Liberty half dollar.
Q 03Wallace Stevens spent his working life as an executive in which industry while writing poems in his spare hours?
Insurance
Insurance paid the poet's bills from 1916 to the end of his life, and he kept the two worlds apart. He judged surety claims by day and composed on his way to and from the office.
Q 04In the opening of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, a woman lingers at home over coffee and which fruit?
Oranges
Oranges and coffee stand for the earthly pleasures the woman chooses over church. Later her thoughts drift from that breakfast to the bread and wine of communion.
Q 05Wallace Stevens wrote a sequence of thirteen short, haiku-like sections describing ways of looking at which bird?
A blackbird
A blackbird is the one constant across the thirteen spare sections, which borrow the feel of haiku without its rules. A new-music ensemble took its name from the eighth section.
Q 06In Wallace Stevens's Anecdote of the Jar, the speaker sets a jar on a hill in which American state?
Tennessee
Tennessee is where Stevens was staying when he wrote the poem in 1918, in the town of Elizabethton. One scholar traced the jar to a real brand of canning jar called Dominion.
Q 07The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens is often linked to The Old Guitarist, painted by which artist?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso painted the blind musician in 1903–04, and Stevens may have seen it exhibited in Connecticut in 1934. The poet always insisted he had no particular painting in mind.
Q 08Which prize did Wallace Stevens win for his Collected Poems in 1955, only months before he died that August?
The Pulitzer
The Pulitzer capped a late rush of fame for Stevens. Wide recognition only reached him with that collection, published a year before he died.
Q 09Which university offered Wallace Stevens a faculty post in 1955, which he declined rather than leave his day job?
Harvard
Harvard, where Stevens had studied in the 1890s, wanted him back as a teacher at 75. Accepting would have forced him out of his company, so he said no.
Q 10Which fellow poet quarrelled with Wallace Stevens at a Key West hotel, dismissing his poems as bric-a-brac?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost and Stevens clashed at the Casa Marina in 1935 and again in 1940. Stevens complained that his rival wrote about subjects, and was told in return that he wrote about bric-a-brac.
Q 11Which Poetry magazine editor cut three stanzas from Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning for its first printing in 1915?
Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe printed only five of the eight stanzas, and in a different order. Stevens restored the full poem when it appeared in his first book in 1923.
Q 12Which bright green bird has been let loose on the rug in the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?
A cockatoo
A cockatoo shares the bright room, its green wings part of the vivid comfort the woman enjoys. Once she thinks of the Crucifixion, bird and fruit alike lose their colour for her.
Q 13Which birds sink toward darkness at evening in the closing image of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?
Pigeons
Q 21In which Pennsylvania city, also the hometown of his wife Elsie, was the poet Wallace Stevens born?
Reading
Reading gave Stevens both his birthplace and his bride, whom he met on a visit home in 1904. His parents thought her beneath him, and no one from his family came to the wedding.
Q 22In which Connecticut city did Wallace Stevens live and work from 1916 until the end of his life?
Hartford
Hartford became his home after a merger cost him his New York job, and he never moved away. He bought a 1920s Colonial there in 1932 and kept it for the rest of his life.
Q 23Which senior title did the poet Wallace Stevens hold at his Connecticut employer from 1934 onward?
Vice president
Pigeons close the poem, drifting down on outstretched wings with no set course as night falls. Stevens closes not on an answer but on that slow, wavering fall.
Q 14In Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, the woman's daydream carries her across the seas to which ancient land?
Palestine
Palestine draws her thoughts because it holds the tomb of Jesus, the old faith she is skipping that day. Near the end a voice tells her that no spirits linger at that grave.
Q 15Which Roman god's motherless birth in the clouds opens the third stanza of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?
Jove
Jove stands for the remote gods who came before Christianity, born with no human tie to the earth. The stanza moves from him to Jesus and on to a paradise found in this world.
Q 16In Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, the speaker tells the doubting woman that what is the mother of beauty?
Death
Death makes beauty possible in the poem, because only things that end can be cherished. The thought echoes the close of Keats's Ode on Melancholy.
Q 17In stanza seven of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, a ring of chanting men show their devotion to what?
The sun
The sun is praised by the dancers as a source of life rather than as a god. Stevens offers their summer ring as a picture of worship with no church attached.
Q 18Which poetic form did Wallace Stevens choose for the eight fifteen-line stanzas of Sunday Morning?
Blank verse
Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, gives the poem a stately sound closer to Wordsworth and Keats than to the experiments of his own generation.
Q 19Wallace Stevens once described his Sunday Morning as simply an expression of which pre-Christian outlook?
Paganism
Paganism was the poet's own one-word gloss, though critics read more into it. Helen Vendler calls the poem his search for a truth to replace the Christianity of his childhood.
Q 20A peignoir is named in the first line of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning; what kind of garment is it?
A dressing gown
A dressing gown sets the scene, because the woman is still lounging at home late on a day traditionally kept for worship. Stevens leaves her unnamed throughout.
Vice president was the rank Stevens reached at 54, and it paid about $20,000 a year in the depths of the Depression. He stayed at his desk well past the usual retirement age of 70.
Q 24A hospital chaplain said Wallace Stevens converted to which faith in his final months, a claim his daughter disputed?
Catholicism
Catholicism was the faith Father Arthur Hanley said he received the poet into at St. Francis Hospital in 1955. The daughter, who was not in the room, never accepted the story.
Q 25Which philosopher befriended the student Wallace Stevens and later inspired his poem To an Old Philosopher in Rome?
George Santayana
George Santayana traded sonnets with the young Stevens, who stayed devoted to him for life. The poem came when Stevens heard his old mentor was living out his last years in a home in Rome.
Q 26Before his corporate career, Wallace Stevens trained in New York for which profession, like his father before him?
The law
The law ran in the family: his father was a prosperous attorney and two of his brothers took the same degree. Stevens qualified in 1903 and joined the bar the following year.
Q 27Wallace Stevens is ranked with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as a leading American poet of which movement?
Modernism
Modernism claimed Stevens late, since his first book did not appear until his forties. His biographer still placed Pound and Eliot in the poet's true circle of philosopher-poets.
Q 28Which debut collection by Wallace Stevens sold only about a hundred copies before its first edition was remaindered?
Harmonium
Harmonium flopped in 1923 even though it held many of his best-loved poems. Stevens had first wanted to call it The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae.
Q 29Which New York publisher issued Wallace Stevens's first book in 1923 and his Collected Poems in 1954?
Knopf
Knopf printed 1,500 copies of the debut and stayed with Stevens for three decades, through most of his major volumes to the final collected edition.
Q 30Which American literary honor did Wallace Stevens win twice, for The Auroras of Autumn and for his Collected Poems?
National Book Award
The National Book Award went to Stevens in 1951 and again in 1955. The first winning book takes its title from the northern lights seen in the fall.