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50 free Romantic Poets trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The English Romantic poets rebelled against the tidy, reasoned verse of the 18th century and wrote instead about feeling, imagination, nature and the sublime. Wordsworth and Coleridge launched the movement with Lyrical Ballads in 1798; Blake was already printing his own illuminated books in London; and the second generation of Byron, Shelley and Keats burned out young in Italy and Greece, leaving some of the most quoted lines in the language. This quiz mixes the poems with the lives. You will need to know who shot the albatross, who was interrupted by a person from Porlock, which pharaoh stands behind Ozymandias and what Keats asked to have carved on his grave. You will also need the biographies: the club foot, the opium, the expulsion from Oxford, the boat that went down in a storm, the villa on Lake Geneva where Frankenstein began, and the Greek town where Byron died. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. The easy tier is school-syllabus material; the expert tier goes into pen names, pamphlets and the poets' grandfathers.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote the long poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?
Lord Byron
Childe Harold made him a celebrity overnight; Don Juan was still unfinished when he died in 1824.
Q 02Shelley's second wife, Mary, wrote which novel?
Frankenstein
She began it during the rain-soaked summer of 1816 at Byron's villa on Lake Geneva.
Q 03Which bird does the Ancient Mariner shoot?
Albatross
The crew hang the dead bird around his neck, which is where the expression comes from.
Q 04Who wrote the sonnet 'Ozymandias'?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It appeared in The Examiner in January 1818, under a pen name.
Q 05Who wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?
John Keats
Both belong to the run of great odes he wrote in the spring of 1819, two years before his death.
Q 06Who wrote 'The Tyger' and Songs of Innocence?
William Blake
He printed and hand-coloured the books himself with his wife Catherine, and sold very few in his lifetime.
Q 07Wordsworth is associated with which English region?
Lake District
He, Coleridge and Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets.
Q 08Which 1798 collection is generally said to have begun English Romanticism?
Lyrical Ballads
Its 1800 preface, arguing for poetry in 'the real language of men', is often called the manifesto of Romanticism.
Q 09Which poet co-wrote the 1798 collection with Coleridge that launched the movement?
William Wordsworth
He wrote 19 of the 23 poems in the first edition, though Coleridge's four made up a third of the length.
Q 10Who wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is his longest major poem and opened the first edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Q 11Keats died at 25 of which disease?
Tuberculosis
His mother and his brother Tom had died of the same disease, and he had nursed Tom himself.
Q 12How did Shelley die in 1822?
Drowned in a boating accident
His boat, the Don Juan, went down in a storm off the Italian coast; his body was cremated on the beach.
Q 13Coleridge struggled for most of his life with addiction to which drug?
Opium
He was first given laudanum for childhood illness, and later claimed 'Kubla Khan' came to him in an opium dream.
Byron died in 1824 while fighting in which conflict?
Q 21Besides poetry, Blake worked professionally in which trade?
Engraving
He started by engraving copies of Greek antiquities as a boy and later invented his own relief-etching method.
Q 22Byron attended which university?
Cambridge
Shelley, by contrast, went to Oxford and was thrown out within a year.
Q 23What is generally considered Wordsworth's magnum opus?
The Prelude
It was only published, and titled, by his wife after his death in 1850; before that it was 'The Poem to Coleridge'.
Q 24To whom does the Ancient Mariner tell his tale?
Greek War of Independence
He died of a fever at Missolonghi aged 36, and Greeks still treat him as a national hero.
Q 15Keats died in which city in 1821?
Rome
He had gone to Italy for the climate; his house by the Spanish Steps is now the Keats–Shelley Memorial House.
Q 16Romantic poetry was a reaction against which earlier style?
Neoclassicism
Out went the age of epics, odes and satires governed by rule; in came emotion, imagination and nature.
Q 17Wordsworth defined poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful' what?
Feelings
The line is from his 1800 Preface, which adds that it 'takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility'.
Q 18Which pioneer of computing was Byron's daughter?
Ada Lovelace
She was born in December 1815, weeks before her parents' marriage collapsed, and is buried beside him.
Q 19Byron said 'I awoke one morning and found myself' what?
Famous
The morning after the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage appeared in 1812.
Q 20What was the name of Wordsworth's sister, the diarist?
Dorothy
They lived together at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and her journals record the walk that produced his daffodils.
A Wedding-Guest
The listener goes from impatience to fear to fascination, held by the old sailor's glittering eye.
Q 25Who was Keats's fiancée, to whom he wrote his best-known letters?
Fanny Brawne
He left for Rome in 1820 knowing he would probably never see her again.
Q 26Byron's Villa Diodati, scene of the 1816 ghost-story contest, overlooked which water?
Lake Geneva
Kept indoors by incessant rain, the party read German ghost stories and set out to write their own.
Q 27Byron was born with what physical condition?
A deformed foot
He compensated with violent bouts of exercise, boxing and swimming, including the Hellespont.
Q 28Which Blake poem became the words of the hymn 'Jerusalem'?
And did those feet in ancient time
It comes from the preface to his epic Milton; Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916.
Q 29Who called Byron 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'?
Lady Caroline Lamb
She was his lover; Annabella Milbanke became his wife, and that went badly too.
Q 30Which phrase about following a story did Coleridge coin?
Suspension of disbelief
He also helped introduce German idealist philosophy to England and influenced Emerson's transcendentalism.