The Key to a Great Title Trivia Quiz

Answer: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Thomas Gray)

Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and first major success, "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874) was the first of the author's works to be set in the fictional English county of Wessex. The plot focuses on beautiful, strong-willed farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her relationships with various men; unlike most of Hardy's other works, the novel has a happy ending of sorts.

The phrase "far from the madding crowd" is found in Line 73 of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), one of the best-known poems in the English language.

The poem, written as a meditation on death and remembrance after death, also hinges on the idealization of country life - an idyll that is subverted by Hardy's often harshly realistic portrayal of rural life.

Answer: "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" (Ernest Dowson)

The title of Margaret Mitchell's only novel (published in 1936) comes from a poem by Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), a relatively obscure English author associated with the Decadent movement of the late 19th century. The poem's Latin title comes in turn from one of Horace's "Odes". Dowson's poetry often touches upon the fleeting, fragile nature of human life, reflecting the writer's own tragic experience: he died of tuberculosis at the age of 32, after having lost both his parents to the disease.

The phrase "gone with the wind" (found in the first line of the poem's third stanza) is used in Mitchell's novel to represent the inevitable end of the traditional Southern way of life after the Civil War - while in Dowson's poem it refers to a lost love.

Answer: "Leaves of Grass" (Walt Whitman)

Walt Whitman's poem "Passage to India" (n. 183 of "Leaves of Grass", 1881-1882 edition) celebrates some of the greatest engineering achievements of the second half of the 19th century - in particular the opening of the Suez Canal, which made travelling to India and the rest of Asia much faster and easier.

In E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, however, Whitman's enthusiastic tone is replaced by a much darker tinge, as the story explores the contradictions implicit in the very idea of "empire" and what we now call globalization, dealing with thorny issues such as interracial relationships and the subjection and exploitation of native peoples.

Answer: "To a Skylark" (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Though the "blithe spirit" in the opening line of Shelley's 1820 poem refers to the titular bird, the phrase provided English playwright Noel Coward with the perfect title for a comedy about ghosts. The play, premiered in 1941, deals with the unexpected effects of a séance in which the spiteful first wife of a novelist is inadvertently summoned.

Shelley's poem, on the other hand, was inspired by an evening walk in the country near the Italian city of Livorno (Leghorn), during which the poet and his wife Mary (the author of "Frankenstein") heard the melodious song of skylark and saw fireflies emerging from myrtle hedges.

Answer: "Macbeth" (William Shakespeare)

William Shakespeare's work is an enduring source of inspiration for any author looking for a great title. Rather fittingly for a dark fantasy novel by one of the undisputed masters of modern speculative fiction, Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (1962) takes its title from the iconic scene in Act IV of "Macbeth", when the three witches meeting around a bubbling cauldron feel the protagonist's presence outside their cave. Bradbury's novel relates the nightmarish experiences of two young boys (both born around Halloween) with a sinister traveling carnival that comes to their small town in late October.

Answer: "Sailing to Byzantium" (William Butler Yeats)

Known also for its Academy Award-winning 2007 film adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen, Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" (2005) is a dark tale about a drug deal gone awry in the desert country on the US-Mexican border. The novel's protagonist, a WWII veteran haunted by his actions during that conflict, is in his late 50s, while William Butler Yeats was 60 when he wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" (published in 1928) - a powerful statement about old age and the effort required to keep the soul alive when the body is decaying.

The phrase "no country for old men" is found in the poem's opening line.

Answer: "The Odyssey" (Homer)

William Faulkner's 1930 novel "As I Lay Dying" tells the story of the death and burial of Addie Bundren - a woman from a poor, rural Southern family who wishes to be buried in her hometown. The novel, narrated by 15 different characters, makes extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered in the 1920s by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

The title comes from the meeting between Odysseus and the ghost of Agamemnon in the underworld, in Book XI of Homer's "Odyssey". The former commander of the Greek army tells Odysseus how he was killed by his wife's lover, and how his wife did not even bother to close his eyes as he was dying.

Answer: "The Lady of Shalott" (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

Published in 1962, "The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side" is one of Agatha Christie's best-known novels featuring village sleuth Miss Marple. It was inspired by a tragic real-life event, the birth of actress Gene Tierney's severely disabled first child after the actress had been infected by German measles. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the author of the Arthurian ballad "The Lady of Shalott" (1833/1842), is mentioned several times in the novel, as are the lines containing the phrase that gave the novel its title (found in the last stanza of Part IV).

The mirror cracks when the Lady turns from her loom to look at Sir Lancelot, eventually bringing about her own death.

Answer: "Ode to a Nightingale" (John Keats)

Reflecting the author's experience of his wife Zelda's mental illness and his own alcohol addiction, Francis Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" (1934) was the author's fourth and final completed novel. Though its reception at the time of publishing was rather lukewarm, the novel is now considered one of the masterpieces of English-language 20th-century fiction.

The quote that gave the novel its title is found in the fourth stanza of John Keats' gorgeous "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819). In the poem, night can be seen as a metaphor for death and the poet's acceptance of it: Keats, who suffered from consumption, died in 1821 at the age of 25.

Answer: "The Aeneid" (Virgil)

George Bernard Shaw's 1894 comedy about the futility of war (later published as part of "Plays Pleasant") was one of the Irish playwright's first commercial successes. Set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, it deals with the romantic, idealistic views of young Raina Petkoff contrasted with the reality of war and soldiering.

The title "Arms and the Man" comes from "arma virumque cano" (of arms and the man I sing), the opening words of Virgil's epic poem (written between 29 and 19 BC) about the Trojan hero Aeneas, who was believed to have been the ancestor of the Romans.