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The Fascinating Lives of Poets

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Fun Trivia : Quizzes : Poets : The Fascinating Lives of Poets

Introduction:
"Sometimes, fact is stranger than fiction, and just as interesting. Name the poet from the biographical clues given. Many clues contain allusions to the poets’ works, so you need not be a biographer to play!"


1. His “Tales” never told the tale of his own strange journey. He was once captured by the French and later ransomed back to the English.
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    William Langland
    Christopher Marlowe
    Sir Thomas Mallory


2. He was something of a Don Juan, although he was born with a deformity. One of his many pilgrimages included a journey to Greece, where he funded and commanded soldiers who resisted the Turkish forces. He loved the Greek people, and his heart—quite literally--remained in Missonlonghi.
    Lord Byron
    Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Alexander Pope
    Ezra Pound


3. This hunchback taught himself Greek and began writing serious poetry at the age of twelve. In one of those poems, he referred to “this long Disease, my life.”
    Lord Byron
    T.S. Eliot
    Victor Hugo
    Alexander Pope


4. Expelled from college for writing in support of atheism, this poet also had the distinction of driving his wife to drown herself.
    Ezra Pound
    Lord Byron
    Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge


5. This author of the poem “A Farewell to Tobacco” spent most of his life caring for his insane sister, who had stabbed their mother to death.
    Walt Whitman
    Lord Byron
    Charles Lamb
    Ezra Pound


6. He couldn’t pay the debts he’d incurred from wine, women, and opium. So he joined the army under the pseudonym of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.
    Answer: (Last Name Only; consider the initials)


7. A man named William Wayte once sued to have this author of "Venus and Adonis" bound over to keep the peace, "for fear of death."
    William Shakespeare
    Ben Jonson
    Christopher Marlowe
    Arthur Miller


8. This author of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” had a pretty passionate life of his own. He would have been arrested by the Queen’s Privy Council, had he not first been killed in a bar room brawl.
    Ben Jonson
    Christopher Marlowe
    T.S. Eliot
    William Shakespeare


9. Who would have thought an Anglican priest could once have lived such a romantic life? Nevertheless, this poet secretly married the 17 year old niece of Lady Egerton, an act which landed him in jail.
    George Herbert
    William Wordsworth
    Gerard Manley Hopkins
    John Donne


10. This poet would have been tried for treason against the United States, but he was found mentally unfit to stand trial.
    Walt Whitman
    Robert Frost
    Ezra Pound
    T.S. Eliot


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