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Quiz about Poets for All Seasons
Quiz about Poets for All Seasons

Poets for All Seasons Trivia Quiz


Let ten well-known poets and paintings that go with their poems take you through the seasons. Have a happy year!

A photo quiz by nannywoo. Estimated time: 5 mins.
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Author
nannywoo
Time
5 mins
Type
Photo Quiz
Quiz #
388,131
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Average
Avg Score
7 / 10
Plays
764
Awards
Editor's Choice
Last 3 plays: davejacobs (7/10), gme24 (8/10), Guest 101 (9/10).
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Question 1 of 10
1. What reclusive Massachusetts poet studied botany at Amherst Academy and other sciences at Mount Holyoke College in the 1840s and, in addition to writing at least 1,789 poems, compiled an herbarium of flowers and plants? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. What poet praised the beauty of daffodils growing in the springtime near his home, Dove Cottage, in the English Lake District? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. What 20th century confessional poet, whose "Daddy" had an avocation as a beekeeper, wrote a series of poems about bees, taking the female imagery of the hive through the seasons of the year? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. Seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick may be remembered best for his "carpe diem" poem "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" (beginning with the line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"). Is it true or false that Herrick seized the day by marrying twice and having many romantic affairs before dying in his early thirties?


Question 5 of 10
5. Mary Oliver writes about a grasshopper eating sugar from her hand in "The Summer Day" and ends the poem with a question: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" What prestigious American literary award was awarded to her in 1984? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. During which war did Canadian medical doctor and military officer John McCrae write about poppies blowing over the graves of the fallen "In Flanders Fields"? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. She was kidnapped as a child, crossing the stormy Atlantic Ocean. She had to learn a new language but went on to write many poems and letters, even corresponding with General George Washington, who acknowledged a poem she wrote in his praise. Who was this early American poet, who also wrote a poem about a hurricane in the late 1700s? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. A 20th century poet who wrote about this harvest painting is more well-known for a poem about a red wheelbarrow and white chickens. Who was this New Jersey medical doctor who conveyed vivid images using a few well-chosen words? Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. His poem "Spring and Fall" addresses a young girl named Margaret, who is "grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving". What 19th Century Jesuit priest wrote poems with created words, unexpected imagery, and "sprung rhythm" that challenged conventions and read like modern poetry? Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. He began his poem "The Journey of the Magi" with an evocation of winter: "A cold coming we had of it / Just the worst time of the year...." Born in St. Louis, Missouri, what major poet of the Modernist movement journeyed to England as a young man in 1914, later became a British subject and a devout Anglo-Catholic, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948? Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. What reclusive Massachusetts poet studied botany at Amherst Academy and other sciences at Mount Holyoke College in the 1840s and, in addition to writing at least 1,789 poems, compiled an herbarium of flowers and plants?

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) was passionate about nature in all its seasons and seems to have been happiest with her hands in the soil of her home garden and collecting in the woods and fields surrounding Amherst, Massachusetts. Her herbarium is a 66 page book of pressed flowers, leaves, and other parts of plants, collected locally and compiled in a style she learned studying botany in school.

It is archived in Harvard's Houghton Library but is too fragile to be displayed, although images are available online. I chose a crocus to represent this poet, who calls the crocus "Spring's first conviction" (Letter 891) and mentions this flower of early spring by name in several poems.
2. What poet praised the beauty of daffodils growing in the springtime near his home, Dove Cottage, in the English Lake District?

Answer: William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) lived in Dove Cottage (shown in the image) near Grasmere, Cumbria, in the English Lake District, from 1799-1808. His sister Dorothy lived with him, and after his marriage in 1802, his wife Mary, her sister, and the first three of five children were added to the household; other poets, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were frequent visitors.

The Wordsworths deliberately cultivated a "wild" garden, replicating the untamed natural scenery that inspired the poets of the Romantic Movement.

Here, Wordsworth wrote the much-loved lyric poem "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" reflecting on the unexpected beauty of a bank of daffodils seen on a walk along the lake with his sister.
3. What 20th century confessional poet, whose "Daddy" had an avocation as a beekeeper, wrote a series of poems about bees, taking the female imagery of the hive through the seasons of the year?

Answer: Sylvia Plath

While poems of powerful emotion like "Daddy" came to be more well-known, Sylvia Plath (1932-63) wrote in a letter to her mother that she felt the more subtle but equally powerful bee poems of the "Ariel Sequence" to be her best work. Plath's professor father, who died when she was eight, kept hives and wrote extensively on bees. Plath's five poems take us through the seasonal experience of beekeeping she and her husband, poet Ted Hughes, attempted in Devon, England, ending with "Wintering" and its final lines: "What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? / The bees are flying.

They taste the spring". Look closely to find a bee on one of the roses in the painting by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.
4. Seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick may be remembered best for his "carpe diem" poem "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" (beginning with the line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"). Is it true or false that Herrick seized the day by marrying twice and having many romantic affairs before dying in his early thirties?

Answer: False

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) never married, even though he lived to the age of 83, and scholars have been unable to connect the erotic female characters of his poems to any flesh and blood woman. He commented on his bachelorhood: "Love he that will; it best likes me,/ To have my neck from Loves yoke-free" and "Go I must; when I am gone,/ Write but this upon my Stone;/ Chaste I liv'd, without a wife,/ That's the Story of my life." A Cambridge scholar, he is counted among the Cavalier poets, because he supported the king during the English Civil War, losing his position as a clergyman as a result, only regaining it when Charles II returned in the Restoration of 1660.

While the 1904 painting by John William Waterhouse connects Herrick's famous poem to the sensual pursuits of springtime, the poet/priest also reveled in the seasons of the liturgical year and (despite the Puritan ban on Christmas celebrations) wrote joyful wintertime poems, taking the reader from Christmas Eve to Candlemas (February 2) when decorations are taken down and candles blessed for the coming year.
5. Mary Oliver writes about a grasshopper eating sugar from her hand in "The Summer Day" and ends the poem with a question: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" What prestigious American literary award was awarded to her in 1984?

Answer: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, American poet Mary Oliver, born in 1935, has won the National Book Award (1992), the Lannan Literary Award (1998), and numerous other literary prizes; however, she did not receive the Nobel Prize in 1984, nor has she been awarded a Costa Poetry Award (formerly the Whitbread Award) or a Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, which are open only to British or Commonwealth writers.

In keeping with the theme of this quiz, Mary Oliver is indeed a poet for all seasons, conveying sharp, original images of nature in a voice both lyrical and down to earth; as fellow poet Maxine Kumin writes in "The Women's Review of Books" Oliver is an "indefatigable guide to the natural world". Grasshoppers are enjoying summer fruit in the Ambrosius Bosschaert painting from the 1600s, much like the sugar-eating one in Mary Oliver's poem.
6. During which war did Canadian medical doctor and military officer John McCrae write about poppies blowing over the graves of the fallen "In Flanders Fields"?

Answer: World War I

John McCrae (1872-1918) wrote "In Flanders Fields" in response to the death of a friend and fellow soldier who was killed in action in May, 1915, at the 2nd Battle of Ypres (in Flanders) during World War I. In Europe, poppies are summer flowers that may bloom from warm days in May into the fall, although it would be rare to see them growing wild as late as November 11, when paper poppies are used for Remembrance Day (called Armistice Day or Veterans Day in the United States).

It was McCrae's poem that inspired the poppy tradition. November 11 is St. Martin's Day, or Martinmas, in the church calendar and was long celebrated in the part of Belgium called Flanders (and in other European countries) as the end of the growing season and the beginning of winter. St. Martin of Tours (born 316 A.D.) was both the son of a Roman soldier and a soldier himself, and there are many ways in which Martinmas resonates with Remembrance Day.

The 1885 painting of poppies is by Ellen Thayer Fisher.
7. She was kidnapped as a child, crossing the stormy Atlantic Ocean. She had to learn a new language but went on to write many poems and letters, even corresponding with General George Washington, who acknowledged a poem she wrote in his praise. Who was this early American poet, who also wrote a poem about a hurricane in the late 1700s?

Answer: Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley's poem "To a Lady on Her Remarkable Preservation in a Hurricane in North-Carolina" reflects on a particular storm of the kind that occurs often during the Atlantic hurricane season between June and November. Her poem to "His Excellency George Washington" paints a patriotic scene of the Continental Army, looking like colorful fall foliage, and she corresponded with Washington about the poem and may have met him in person. Better known is her poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" in which she seems to see slavery as a good thing because she came to be a Christian through it. Phillis (not Phyllis) was bought by the Wheatley family in 1761 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she was thought to be around six or seven years old because her front baby teeth were missing. Unlike most slaves, Phillis was taught to read and write, and her literary talents were encouraged and admired, not only in colonial and revolutionary America but in England, especially among evangelical Christians working to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.

The 1840 painting "Storm at Sea" by Robert Salmon reflects the subject of her hurricane poem but also can remind us of the Middle Passage and what must have been a terrifying experience for a little girl.
8. A 20th century poet who wrote about this harvest painting is more well-known for a poem about a red wheelbarrow and white chickens. Who was this New Jersey medical doctor who conveyed vivid images using a few well-chosen words?

Answer: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) begins his poem about the harvest painting by 16th Century artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder with the single-word exclamation, "Summer!" and ends with the image of the sleeping figure in the painting, who is the "resting / center of / their workaday world." Greatly influenced by modernist paintings in the 1913 Armory Show, Williams sought to do with words what European painters of the early 20th century were doing in the visual arts. Specializing in pediatrics, Williams had successful careers both as a physician and as a poet.

His motto - "No ideas but in things" - is carried out in his poems, which do not seek to explain, but trust the images and the reader to make their own meanings.
9. His poem "Spring and Fall" addresses a young girl named Margaret, who is "grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving". What 19th Century Jesuit priest wrote poems with created words, unexpected imagery, and "sprung rhythm" that challenged conventions and read like modern poetry?

Answer: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) chose to keep most of his poetry out of print during his lifetime, out of respect for his vocation as a Roman Catholic priest. His innovative verse is more at home in the 20th century and beyond than it was in the Victorian period. Hopkins added accent marks to syllables to indicate the unique rhythm, as in the first lines of "Spring and Fall" which read: "MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? / Leáves, líke the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?" His word choices and sentence structures invite multiple readings; for example, the coined word "unleaving" may refer both to the shedding of leaves (a change) and the permanence of the grove or the continuing cycle of the seasons.

The painting is by Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844-1926).
10. He began his poem "The Journey of the Magi" with an evocation of winter: "A cold coming we had of it / Just the worst time of the year...." Born in St. Louis, Missouri, what major poet of the Modernist movement journeyed to England as a young man in 1914, later became a British subject and a devout Anglo-Catholic, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948?

Answer: T.S. Eliot

Many poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) - "The Waste Land" or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", for example - are difficult to understand. Others - like "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", which inspired a Broadway musical - are fun. "The Journey of the Magi" is approachable but serious, and most scholars agree that the poem reflects T.S. Eliot's conversion in 1927 to Christianity as it is practiced in the High Anglican Church.

In keeping with the seasonal theme of this quiz, "The Journey of the Magi" begins with cold images in "the very dead of winter" and ends with the speaker unsure of whether the journey celebrated a birth or a death - not your usual sweet Christmas story, but worthy of some thought.

The painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicts another part of the Christ narrative - "The Numbering at Bethlehem" - in a Medieval European setting that also captures winter's cold.
Source: Author nannywoo

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