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British Poetry — Chaucer to the Present — GK Questions with Answers

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26 questions
  1. Beowulf is written in —
    1. rhyming couplets
    2. alliterative verse
    3. blank verse
    4. terza rima
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) alliterative verse

    Old English verse uses alliteration and a caesura, not rhyme.

  2. A "kenning" is —
    1. a type of stanza
    2. a compound metaphor such as whale-road
    3. an alliterative line
    4. a kind of elegy
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) a compound metaphor such as whale-road

    Examples are whale-road for sea and ring-giver for king.

  3. The first English poet known by name is —
    1. Cynewulf
    2. Cædmon
    3. Chaucer
    4. Langland
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Cædmon

    Cædmon, whose story Bede tells.

  4. The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales set out from —
    1. the Mermaid Tavern
    2. the Tabard Inn
    3. Canterbury Cathedral
    4. the Globe
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) the Tabard Inn

    The Tabard Inn in Southwark, under the host Harry Bailly.

  5. Blank verse was introduced into English by —
    1. Wyatt
    2. Surrey
    3. Spenser
    4. Marlowe
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Surrey

    Surrey, in his translation of part of the Aeneid.

  6. The Spenserian stanza has —
    1. eight lines
    2. nine lines ending in an alexandrine
    3. ten lines
    4. fourteen lines
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) nine lines ending in an alexandrine

    Nine lines rhyming ababbcbcc, the last an alexandrine.

  7. Shakespeare wrote how many sonnets?
    1. 100
    2. 126
    3. 154
    4. 200
    Show answer

    Answer: (C) 154

    154 — 1 to 126 to the Fair Youth, 127 to 152 to the Dark Lady.

  8. Which poet wrote the "pattern poems" "Easter Wings" and "The Altar"?
    1. Donne
    2. Herbert
    3. Marvell
    4. Vaughan
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Herbert

    George Herbert, in The Temple.

  9. Paradise Lost was finally published in —
    1. ten books
    2. twelve books
    3. fourteen books
    4. four books
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) twelve books

    Ten books in 1667, revised into twelve in 1674.

  10. The heroine of The Rape of the Lock is —
    1. Clarissa
    2. Belinda
    3. Thalestris
    4. Ariel
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Belinda

    Belinda, whose lock the Baron cuts.

  1. The "person from Porlock" interrupted the composition of —
    1. Christabel
    2. Kubla Khan
    3. The Ancient Mariner
    4. Dejection: An Ode
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Kubla Khan

    Coleridge said the visitor broke off Kubla Khan.

  2. Shelley’s Adonais is an elegy on —
    1. Byron
    2. Keats
    3. Coleridge
    4. Chatterton
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Keats

    On the death of John Keats in 1821.

  3. Tennyson’s In Memoriam mourns —
    1. Edward King
    2. Arthur Henry Hallam
    3. Arthur Hugh Clough
    4. his father
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Arthur Henry Hallam

    Arthur Henry Hallam, his friend at Cambridge.

  4. Who was Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892?
    1. Wordsworth
    2. Tennyson
    3. Southey
    4. Bridges
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Tennyson

    Tennyson — the longest tenure of the office.

  5. "Sprung rhythm" was devised by —
    1. Swinburne
    2. Hopkins
    3. Browning
    4. Arnold
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Hopkins

    Gerard Manley Hopkins, who counted stresses rather than syllables.

  6. Hopkins’s poems were first published in —
    1. 1889
    2. 1900
    3. 1918
    4. 1930
    Show answer

    Answer: (C) 1918

    1918, nearly thirty years after his death, by Robert Bridges.

  7. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in —
    1. 1832
    2. 1848
    3. 1859
    4. 1870
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) 1848

    1848, by D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais.

  8. The first writer in English to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was —
    1. Yeats
    2. Kipling
    3. Shaw
    4. Eliot
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling, in 1907.

  9. The Waste Land is dedicated to —
    1. W. B. Yeats
    2. Ezra Pound
    3. Vivienne Eliot
    4. James Joyce
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Ezra Pound

    Ezra Pound, whom Eliot called il miglior fabbro, "the better craftsman".

  10. The closing words of The Waste Land are drawn from —
    1. the Bible
    2. the Upanishads
    3. Dante
    4. the Buddha’s Fire Sermon
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) the Upanishads

    "Shantih shantih shantih" is from the Upanishads.

  1. Which war poet was killed one week before the Armistice?
    1. Rupert Brooke
    2. Wilfred Owen
    3. Isaac Rosenberg
    4. Edward Thomas
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Wilfred Owen

    Wilfred Owen, in November 1918.

  2. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is written in which form?
    1. sonnet
    2. villanelle
    3. sestina
    4. ode
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) villanelle

    A villanelle, by Dylan Thomas.

  3. The Movement of the 1950s is best represented by —
    1. Ted Hughes
    2. Philip Larkin
    3. Dylan Thomas
    4. W. H. Auden
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Philip Larkin

    Larkin — plain speech against modernist obscurity.

  4. Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in —
    1. 1985
    2. 1990
    3. 1995
    4. 2000
    Show answer

    Answer: (C) 1995

    1995. He also made a celebrated translation of Beowulf.

  5. The first woman Poet Laureate was —
    1. Elizabeth Jennings
    2. Carol Ann Duffy
    3. Wendy Cope
    4. Ruth Padel
    Show answer

    Answer: (B) Carol Ann Duffy

    Carol Ann Duffy, appointed in 2009.

  6. Arrange chronologically: (i) Lyrical Ballads (ii) The Faerie Queene (iii) The Waste Land (iv) The Rape of the Lock
    1. ii, iv, i, iii
    2. ii, i, iv, iii
    3. iv, ii, i, iii
    4. i, ii, iv, iii
    Show answer

    Answer: (A) ii, iv, i, iii

    1590 → 1712 → 1798 → 1922.

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