William Wordsworth
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free William Wordsworth trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
William Wordsworth changed what English poetry could be about. Writing in the plain language of ordinary people, he found his subjects in country walks, childhood memories and the hills and lakes of north-west England, and he helped to launch the Romantic age along the way. This quiz covers his life and his writing. It gives close attention to two sonnets that students meet again and again, The World Is Too Much with Us and Composed upon Westminster Bridge, with questions on what each one says, how it is built and how it came to be written. Other questions take in his sister Dorothy, his friendship with Coleridge, his homes in the Lake District, his years as Poet Laureate, and the writers who admired or mocked him. It is written for students revising the poems, for teachers who want a quick classroom check, and for readers who simply enjoy his work. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the questions can be played on screen or printed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which flowers did William Wordsworth immortalise in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud after a lakeside walk with his sister?
Daffodils
Daffodils gave the poem its popular nickname, and his wife supplied the two lines he thought its best. A BBC Radio 4 poll in 1995 ranked it the UK's fifth favourite poem.
Q 02Which singer alludes to William Wordsworth in The Lakes, a 2020 bonus track about escaping to the Lake District?
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift released the song on the deluxe edition of her album Folklore. Its lyrics dream of a quiet retreat near Windermere, far from social media.
Q 03What sight in the sky thrills the speaker of William Wordsworth's My Heart Leaps Up, written one night at Grasmere?
A rainbow
A rainbow gives the poem its other title, The Rainbow. Royal Mail chose an extract from it for a 2020 stamp marking 250 years since the poet's birth.
Q 04What did William Wordsworth campaign against in old age with a protest sonnet and letters to a London newspaper?
A railway
A railway from Kendal to Windermere would, he argued, wreck the Lake District landscape. The line opened anyway in 1847, and one of its engineers answered him with a poem of his own.
Q 05Which poet and artist claimed a passage in Wordsworth's The Excursion gave him a near-fatal bowel complaint?
William Blake
William Blake told the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson so, and Robinson passed the remark on in a letter to Wordsworth's sister. Blake otherwise loved the poems, Robinson added.
Q 06Which fantasy author took the title of his 1955 memoir from William Wordsworth's poem Surprised by Joy?
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis used it for the story of his road from atheism to Christianity. Friends teased him about the title when he later married the American writer Joy Gresham.
Q 07Which 1798 collection did William Wordsworth publish anonymously with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads is generally taken to mark the start of the English Romantic movement. Coleridge supplied only four of its poems, though they filled about a third of the book.
Q 08In William Wordsworth's sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us, what would the speaker rather be, to feel less forlorn?
A pagan
A pagan, the speaker reasons, could at least glimpse the old sea gods in the waves. He calls that faith an outworn creed, yet envies its closeness to nature.
Q 09At what time of day does William Wordsworth admire London in Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802?
Early morning
Early morning fits the facts: his sister's journal says they left London at half past five or six. The date in the title is off, though, since they crossed the bridge on 31 July.
Q 10Which ruin on the River Wye names a poem William Wordsworth claimed to compose entirely in his head?
Tintern
Tintern Abbey itself never appears in the poem, which is set a few miles upstream. It was slipped into his joint 1798 collection with Coleridge at the eleventh hour, as the closing piece.
Q 11Which Greek sea god does William Wordsworth long to see rising from the waves in The World Is Too Much with Us?
Proteus
Proteus was the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, able to foretell the future but apt to change form to avoid doing so. The sonnet pairs him with Triton, who blows a horn.
Q 12William Wordsworth's sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us scolds an industrialising Britain for surrendering to what?
Materialism
Materialism is the charge: people absorbed in earning and buying have, he says, drifted out of tune with nature. It was one of several sonnets he aimed at the cynicism of the age.
Q 13In William Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much with Us, what are the six lines that answer the opening eight called?
Sestet
Q 21Which former inn at Grasmere was William Wordsworth's home from 1799 to 1808, the years of his finest poetry?
Dove Cottage
Dove Cottage had been a pub called the Dove and Olive before he rented it for £5 a year. Thomas De Quincey took it over when the growing family moved out.
Q 22In which Cumbrian town was William Wordsworth born, in a Georgian house later saved from becoming a bus station?
Cockermouth
Cockermouth was also the birthplace of his sister Dorothy, born there the following year. A national campaign rescued the family home, which passed to the National Trust in 1938.
Q 23At which university did William Wordsworth take his degree, spending the holidays on long walking tours?
Cambridge
The sestet is where the sonnet turns from complaint to its startling wish. The rhymes shift as well, from the octave's ABBA ABBA to CDCD CD.
Q 14Which 1807 collection first printed William Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much with Us, to hostile reviews?
Poems, in Two Volumes
Poems, in Two Volumes also held his ode on childhood and his best-loved lines on lakeside flowers. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review was among the critics who mauled it.
Q 15To which port across the Channel was William Wordsworth travelling when he crossed Westminster Bridge in July 1802?
Calais
Calais was where Annette Vallon, his love of ten years before, was waiting. With the Peace of Amiens letting Britons cross to the Continent again, he went to tell her he was about to marry someone else.
Q 16Which sonnet form did William Wordsworth use for Composed upon Westminster Bridge?
Petrarchan
Petrarchan sonnets, named after the Italian poet Petrarch, set an octave against a six-line answer. Wordsworth took to the sonnet in earnest only in May 1802, and went on to write hundreds of them.
Q 17In William Wordsworth's Composed upon Westminster Bridge, what do the very houses of London seem to be?
Asleep
Asleep is the word the critic Cleanth Brooks singled out: the poet chose it over dead, so the hushed city reads as a living thing at rest.
Q 18What does William Wordsworth say the London air is free of in Composed upon Westminster Bridge?
Smoke
Smoke from countless coal fires usually hung over London. His sister's journal for that day notes that the houses were not overhung by their cloud of it, and that the sun shone with a pure light.
Q 19In what were William Wordsworth and his sister riding when the view from Westminster Bridge inspired his famous sonnet?
A stagecoach
A stagecoach bound for Dover carried them over the bridge, so the sonnet's famous stillness was seen from a moving seat. They had boarded at Charing Cross.
Q 20What collective name did the hostile Edinburgh Review give William Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey?
The Lake Poets
The Lake Poets began as an insult and was never accurate, since the three followed no single school of thought. Readers of their verse flocked to the Lake District all the same.
Cambridge gave him a BA in 1791, from St John's College. His youngest brother Christopher went further there, rising to be Master of Trinity College.
Q 24In which Lakeland village did William Wordsworth attend grammar school after his mother's death?
Hawkshead
Hawkshead Grammar School, founded in 1585, had a fine name for mathematics and for getting boys into university. It closed in 1909 and became a museum.
Q 25Which childhood friend from Penrith became William Wordsworth's wife and lived to publish his greatest poem?
Mary Hutchinson
Mary Hutchinson had met him at a school in Penrith when both were small. They could afford to marry in 1802 only after an earl's heir repaid £4,000 long owed to the poet's late father.
Q 26Which upheaval thrilled the young William Wordsworth on a visit abroad in 1791, then left him bitterly disillusioned?
The French Revolution
The French Revolution won him over to the Republican cause, and he fell in love with Annette Vallon while there. The Reign of Terror soured him, and he came home alone.
Q 27Who followed William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, after Samuel Rogers turned the post down?
Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson went on to hold the laureateship until 1892, the longest tenure of any laureate. Wordsworth, by contrast, wrote no official verses at all in the post.
Q 28Which prime minister coaxed a reluctant William Wordsworth into becoming Poet Laureate by promising him no duties?
Robert Peel
Robert Peel assured him that he would have nothing required of him. Wordsworth had first refused the honour, pleading old age, when Robert Southey's death left it vacant.
Q 29Which government post in Westmorland gave William Wordsworth a steady £400 a year from 1813?
Distributor of Stamps
Distributor of Stamps was the job, and its salary made him financially secure at last, though at the cost of his political independence. That same year the family moved to Rydal Mount.
Q 30Beside which lake did William Wordsworth and his sister see the long belt of wild flowers behind his most famous poem?
Ullswater
Ullswater lay on their way home from visiting the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson in April 1802. He wrote the poem two years later, at Grasmere.