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50 free Poetry trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free Poetry trivia questions with answers. Poetry trivia usually means one question about a rhyme scheme and one about who wrote The Raven. This quiz goes further. It covers the forms (sonnet, haiku, villanelle, limerick, blank verse, terza rima), the epics (Homer, Beowulf, Dante, Milton, Chaucer), the Romantics (Lyrical Ballads, Ozymandias, the person from Porlock), the Americans (Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Hughes, Plath, Angelou, Gorman), and the institutions: who was the first Poet Laureate, what comes with the job besides money, and which poet won the first Nobel Prize in Literature. Early questions suit anyone who did English at school (the 5-7-5 count, who guided Dante through Hell). Later ones will stretch English majors: how many lines the Iliad runs to, who Shelley was competing with when he wrote Ozymandias, and which magazine first printed 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'. Good for a literary pub quiz, a classroom warm-up or a book club. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the poems and poets, and each question shows its source. No poem is quoted beyond a title or a single word.
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Q 01How many sonnets did Shakespeare publish in the 1609 quarto?
154
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.'
Q 02What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean (English) sonnet?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
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.
Q 03Of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, roughly how many were published in her lifetime?
10
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.
Q 04Emily Dickinson's poems are recognisable for slant rhyme, odd capitalisation and heavy use of which punctuation mark?
The dash
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.
Q 05Poe's 'The Raven' was inspired partly by a talking raven in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
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.
Q 06In 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which classical goddess?
Pallas Athena
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.
Q 07T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to which poet, calling him 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman)?
Ezra Pound
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.
Q 08Which Sanskrit word, repeated three times, ends The Waste Land?
Shantih
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.
Q 09A traditional Japanese haiku is composed of 17 sound units arranged in what pattern?
5-7-5
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.
Q 10Which Japanese writer gave the haiku its name, replacing the older term 'hokku'?
Masaoka Shiki
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.
Q 11How many lines does a villanelle have?
19
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.
Q 12Which Dylan Thomas poem to his dying father is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all?
Do not go gentle into that good night
'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.
Q 13Who was appointed Britain's first official Poet Laureate, by Charles II in 1668?
John Dryden
Q 21Paradise Lost is written in which poetic form?
Blank verse
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'.
Q 22Dante's Comedy is made up of how many cantos across Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso?
100
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'.
Q 23Who guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?
Virgil
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.
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.
Q 14Which perk traditionally comes with the British laureateship, alongside a £5,750 stipend?
A barrel of sherry
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.
Q 15Who in 2009 became the first woman, and the first Scot, to be UK Poet Laureate?
Carol Ann Duffy
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.
Q 16Which laureate holds the record for the longest tenure, 42 years from 1850 to 1892?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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.
Q 17Amanda Gorman, who read at Biden's 2021 inauguration, was the first person named to what post?
National Youth Poet Laureate
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.
Q 18The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to a poet from which country?
France
France's Sully Prudhomme, a poet and essayist, won the inaugural 1901 prize, a choice that dismayed admirers of Tolstoy, who was passed over.
Q 19Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel citation praised him for creating 'new poetic expressions' within what?
The great American song tradition
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.
Q 20How did John Milton, blind since 1652, compose the ten-thousand-plus lines of Paradise Lost?
He dictated it to helpers
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.
Q 24Walt Whitman's first, self-published edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 contained how many poems?
12
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.
Q 25Whitman printed which writer's praise, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career', on his 1856 edition's spine?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Q 26Robert Frost is the only poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry how many times?
Four
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.
Q 27Why did Robert Frost recite 'The Gift Outright' from memory at JFK's 1961 inauguration?
Sun glare stopped him reading the page
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.
Q 28Which banker-writer published a rival sonnet in friendly competition with Shelley's 'Ozymandias'?
Horace Smith
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.
Q 29Coleridge said he lost the rest of 'Kubla Khan' when interrupted by a visitor from where?
Porlock
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.
Q 30Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in which year?
1731
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.