Q 01/05

Which novelist knocked Wallace Stevens down in a 1936 fistfight in Key West, leaving the poet with a broken hand?

A) F. Scott Fitzgerald

B) Ernest Hemingway

C) John Dos Passos

D) William Faulkner

Answer · why

B) 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 late...

Q 02/05

Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie is thought to have modelled for which American coin designed by sculptor Adolph Weinman?

A) Buffalo nickel

B) Lincoln cent

C) Mercury dime

D) Morgan dollar

Answer · why

C) 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 h...

Q 03/05

Wallace Stevens spent his working life as an executive in which industry while writing poems in his spare hours?

A) Insurance

B) Banking

C) Publishing

D) Railroads

Answer · why

A) 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...

Q 04/05

In the opening of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, a woman lingers at home over coffee and which fruit?

A) Peaches

B) Figs

C) Grapes

D) Oranges

Answer · why

D) 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 o...

Q 05/05

Wallace Stevens wrote a sequence of thirteen short, haiku-like sections describing ways of looking at which bird?

A) A nightingale

B) A blackbird

C) A skylark

D) An albatross

Answer · why

B) 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 na...