50 Fun Facts About Poetry

How many sonnets did Shakespeare publish in the 1609 quarto?

The 1609 quarto printed 154 sonnets: the first 126 address a young man, sonnets 127 to 152 a 'dark lady', and the cryptic dedication is to 'Mr. W.H.'

What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean (English) sonnet?

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG gives three quatrains and a closing couplet, all in iambic pentameter; the Petrarchan form instead divides into an octave and a sestet.

Of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, roughly how many were published in her lifetime?

Only about 10 of Dickinson's poems appeared in print while she lived, all anonymously and heavily edited; her sister Lavinia found the rest after her death in 1886, and the first collection appeared in 1890.

Emily Dickinson's poems are recognisable for slant rhyme, odd capitalisation and heavy use of which punctuation mark?

The dash is Dickinson's signature mark, standing in for commas and periods throughout her manuscripts; her 1890 editors regularised it to conventional punctuation, and scholarly editions later restored it.

Poe's 'The Raven' was inspired partly by a talking raven in which Charles Dickens novel?

Barnaby Rudge (1841) features the talking raven Grip; Poe reviewed the novel and later wrote 'The Raven', which The American Review bought for about $9 in 1845.

In 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which classical goddess?

Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, is the 'pallid bust of Pallas' above the chamber door; the bird's perch on it sets reason against the narrator's grief for Lenore.

T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to which poet, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman)?

Ezra Pound cut the draft roughly in half, and Eliot's dedication 'il miglior fabbro' borrows Dante's tribute to the troubadour Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio.

Which Sanskrit word, repeated three times, ends The Waste Land?

Shantih, repeated three times, closes the poem; Eliot's own note glosses it as 'The Peace which passeth understanding', the formal ending of an Upanishad.

A traditional Japanese haiku is composed of 17 sound units arranged in what pattern?

The 5-7-5 pattern of on (sound units) usually carries a seasonal word (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji); Basho himself sometimes broke the count.

Which Japanese writer gave the haiku its name, replacing the older term 'hokku'?

Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) popularised 'haiku' for the stand-alone verse in the 1890s; the hokku had been the opening stanza of the collaborative linked form renga.

How many lines does a villanelle have?

A villanelle runs 19 lines: five tercets and a closing quatrain, built on two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet returning as alternating refrains.

Which Dylan Thomas poem to his dying father is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all?

'Do not go gentle into that good night' was written for Thomas's ailing father, D. J. Thomas, and first published in 1951; its refrain 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light' alternates with the title line.

Who was appointed Britain's first official Poet Laureate, by Charles II in 1668?

John Dryden received the first official appointment in 1668; Ben Jonson had drawn a royal pension from 1616 but held no formal title, and Dryden was dismissed in 1689 for refusing the oath to William and Mary.

Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship, alongside a £5,750 stipend?

A barrel of sherry, historically a 'butt of sack', comes with the post; Ben Jonson received a butt of Canary wine, and modern laureates have taken theirs as several hundred bottles.

Who in 2009 became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be UK Poet Laureate?

Carol Ann Duffy, born in Glasgow in 1955, held the post from 2009 to 2019, when Simon Armitage succeeded her; since Andrew Motion's 1999 appointment the laureateship has been a ten-year term, not a life post.

Which laureate holds the record for the longest tenure, 42 years from 1850 to 1892?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson served from 1850, after Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers's refusal, until his own death in 1892; Gray, Scott and Larkin also declined the post.

Amanda Gorman, who read at Biden's 2021 inauguration, was the first person named to what post?

Amanda Gorman was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, at 19; weeks after reading 'The Hill We Climb' at the inauguration she became the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl.

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to a poet from which country?

France's Sully Prudhomme, a poet and essayist, won the inaugural 1901 prize, a choice that dismayed admirers of Tolstoy, who was passed over.

Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel citation praised him for creating 'new poetic expressions' within what?

The citation read 'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'; Dylan skipped the ceremony and delivered his Nobel lecture as a recording in June 2017.

How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose the ten-thousand-plus lines of Paradise Lost?

He dictated it to helpers — his daughters, nephews and friends — in batches of verse composed overnight; the 1667 first edition had ten books, rearranged into twelve in 1674.

Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?

Blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — carries the whole epic; Milton added a prefatory note to the 1668 issue defending 'ancient liberty' from 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming'.

Dante's Comedy is made up of how many cantos across Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso?

The Comedy's 100 cantos divide as 34 for Inferno and 33 each for Purgatorio and Paradiso, written in terza rima in the Tuscan vernacular; Boccaccio was the first to call it 'Divine'.

Who guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?

Virgil, the Roman poet of the Aeneid, leads Dante from the dark wood through Hell and up Mount Purgatory, leaving at the Earthly Paradise; Saint Bernard takes over for Paradise's final cantos.

Walt Whitman's first, self-published edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 contained how many poems?

The 1855 edition held just 12 untitled poems, including the one later called 'Song of Myself'; Whitman set some of the type himself, and by the 1891–92 'deathbed edition' the count neared 400.

Whitman printed which writer's praise, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career', on his 1856 edition's spine?

Ralph Waldo Emerson had written the line in a private letter of thanks for the 1855 edition; Whitman stamped it in gold on the 1856 spine without asking, an early example of the book blurb.

Robert Frost is the only poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry how many times?

Four Pulitzers came for New Hampshire (1924), Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943); Edwin Arlington Robinson, with three, is the next most decorated.

Why did Robert Frost recite 'The Gift Outright' from memory at JFK's 1961 inauguration?

Sun glare stopped him reading the page of his new poem 'Dedication', and Lyndon Johnson's top hat held up as a shade did not help, so the 86-year-old recited 'The Gift Outright' from memory.

Which banker-writer published a rival sonnet in friendly competition with Shelley's 'Ozymandias'?

Horace Smith, a stockbroker who also co-wrote the parody collection Rejected Addresses, published his sonnet in The Examiner in February 1818, weeks after Shelley's; both anticipated the Younger Memnon's arrival in London.

Coleridge said he lost the rest of 'Kubla Khan' when interrupted by a visitor from where?

Coleridge's 1816 preface blames 'a person on business from Porlock', the Somerset village near his farmhouse retreat, for an hour's interruption that scattered the opium-dream vision; Byron urged the poem's publication.

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in which year?

The Cotton library fire of 1731 at Ashburnham House scorched the Nowell Codex's edges; the Old English epic runs to 3,182 alliterative lines, and Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation became a bestseller.

Whose 1936 lecture to the British Academy is often said to mark the start of modern Beowulf criticism?

J. R. R. Tolkien's lecture 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' argued for reading the poem as a work of art rather than a historical quarry, putting the monsters at its centre.

What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?

AABBA: the first, second and fifth lines share one rhyme and the shorter middle pair another; Edward Lear popularised the form in his 1846 Book of Nonsense without ever calling them limericks.

The Greek poet Sappho, of whom only about 650 lines survive, came from which island?

Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean off the coast of Asia Minor, was Sappho's home around 600 BC; only the 'Ode to Aphrodite' survives certainly complete, and antiquity called her the Tenth Muse.

Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' first appeared in 1921 in which magazine?

The Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, printed it in June 1921; Hughes had written the poem at 17 on a train crossing the Mississippi, and it reappeared in The Weary Blues (1926).

Which poet read 'Praise Song for the Day' at Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration?

Elizabeth Alexander, then a Yale professor, read 'Praise Song for the Day' at Barack Obama's first inauguration on January 20, 2009, following Frost, Angelou and Miller Williams as an inaugural poet.

Homer's Iliad is written in which metre?

Dactylic hexameter, six feet of long-short-short (or long-long) syllables, is the epic metre of both Homeric poems; the Iliad's 24 books cover only weeks of the war's final year and never mention the Trojan Horse.

What prize awaited the winner of the storytelling contest in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

A free dinner at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, paid for by the other pilgrims, was the Host's prize; Chaucer planned about 120 tales but completed 24, and the pilgrims were bound for Becket's shrine at Canterbury.

Which 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collection is considered the start of English Romanticism?

Lyrical Ballads appeared anonymously in 1798, opening with Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and closing with Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'; the 1800 second edition added Wordsworth's famous Preface.

Who published the famous 1859 English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?

Edward FitzGerald issued his free translation of the Persian quatrains anonymously in 1859; it sold almost nothing until Pre-Raphaelite poets found remaindered copies in a bookseller's penny box.

Under what pseudonym did Sylvia Plath publish her only novel, The Bell Jar, in 1963?

Victoria Lucas was the name on the January 1963 British edition of The Bell Jar, published a month before Plath's death; the novel first appeared under her own name in Britain in 1966.

Roughly how many lines does the Iliad contain in its standard edition?

The Iliad runs to 15,693 lines in the standard Oxford text, roughly a third longer than the Odyssey's 12,100 or so; scholars date it to the late eighth century BC.

Which poet first read 'Howl' aloud at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955?

Allen Ginsberg premiered 'Howl' at the Six Gallery reading in October 1955; City Lights Books published it in 1956 and won the 1957 obscenity trial brought over it.

The word 'poetry' comes from the Greek 'poiesis', which means what?

Making is the sense of poiesis, from the verb poiein, 'to make'; on the same logic Scots poets were for centuries called 'makars'.

The standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was written in which language?

The standard version was compiled in Akkadian in the second millennium BCE; the earlier, separate Gilgamesh poems it drew on were Sumerian.

A tanka has 31 sound units arranged in what pattern?

5-7-5-7-7 gives 31 on across five units, the classic waka shape; by the tenth-century Kokinshu anthology it had become so dominant that 'waka' effectively meant tanka.

In classic form, a ghazal consists of how many rhyming couplets sharing a refrain?

Five to fifteen couplets is the classic range, each couplet (sher) ending on the same refrain (radif) after a rhyme (qafia); Rumi and Hafez were masters of the form.

What are the three parts of a classical ode, as developed by Pindar?

Strophe, antistrophe and epode mirror the chorus's movements — one way, back again, then standing — in Pindar's victory odes; the strophe and antistrophe share a metre and the epode shifts it.

Which Thai poetic form relies on tone marks called mai ek and mai tho on certain syllables?

Khlong is the Thai form whose rules require the tone marks mai ek and mai tho on prescribed syllables; the constraint probably dates from when Thai had three tones rather than five.

Who organised the first poetry slam, in Chicago in 1986?

Marc Kelly Smith, a construction worker turned poet, began weekly slams at Chicago's Get Me High Lounge and in July 1986 launched the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill jazz club.

Poe's 1848 'prose poem' Eureka is credited with anticipating which scientific theory?

The Big Bang is foreshadowed in Eureka's vision of a universe bursting from a single 'primordial particle' and later collapsing back; Poe also offered a resolution of Olbers' paradox about the dark night sky.