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About This Quiz
Poetry: It's gotten a bad reputation in recent decades as the province of those who hang out in coffeehouses, writing in morose, uncapitalized sentence fragments. (Seriously, are there any more chilling words to hear than "I've written a poem about our relationship. Can I read it to you?") But this art form deserves far more respect than that.
For example, rhyming poetry is often dismissed as being for children -- but did you know that rhyme and meter were originally mnemonic devices that allowed bards to keep hundreds of lines of poetry in their heads, back in the days when written communication was easily destroyed by fire, flood, or war? Or that we wouldn't have national sagas and heroic poems without the rhyme schemes that made it possible?
Poetic techniques, from haiku to sonnets, are less like cages than trellises, on which creativity can grow. Every civilization on earth has created its own particular forms of poetry, each with their own rules. Don't worry, we're not going to test you on rare forms like dyfalu or villanelle (though, if you're curious, the first is a form of nearly verbless Welsh poetry; the second is a complex French form that Dylan Thomas used to write "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"). But do you know what separates blank verse from free verse? Or an ode from an elegy?
Dust off your memories of English class and try our quiz on poetry terms. You might just find yourself inspired to read a little more of this venerable art form, whether it's John Donne or John Berryman!
Finishing lines with words that have the same sound is called ______.
Enjambment
Genre
Rhyme
Rhyme gets a bad rap (no pun intended). First used as a mnemonic device in the days when bards kept long poems entirely in their heads, rhyme is intrinsically pleasing to the ear. It's the reason that the hip-hop world regularly creates millionaires.
Octameter
The natural bounce and flow, stress and "unstress" of a poem is its _____.
Feed
Rhythm
Rhythm is a loose term compared to others in poetry, but it's also key to a satisfying poem. "Meter" is a stricter term, meaning the scheme that gives a poem its rhythm.
Tone
Wit
Poetry without rhyme or meter is called ______.
Blank verse
Free verse
Students often consider free verse to be the highest form of poetry, unconstrained by rules, letting true feelings shine through. Unfortunately, its popularity with the young and unschooled also makes free verse the Official Form of Bad Breakup Poetry.
Elegy
Lazy
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Two lines that rhyme are called a ______.
Coda
Couplet
Couplets sometimes round out an otherwise unrhymed poem. Shakespeare did this a lot, like in "Hamlet," where Hamlet concludes his plans with "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Blazon
Frame
Alliteration is ...
The use of words starting with a vowel
The use of sibilant sounds
A type of allegory
The same letter/sound appearing at the beginning of several words in a sentence
Don't overdo this unless you're writing for children. There's a reason "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" is in a nursery rhyme.
Which of these is comparable to a paragraph in prose writing?
Line
Iamb
Sonnet
Stanza
Though lines and iambs are ways in which poetry is measured, the stanza is most like a paragraph. It's the longest unit, with a space between it and the next stanza.
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More direct than a simile, a ______ says that one thing *is* another.
Allegory
Metaphor
Metaphor is found throughout writing, not just in poetry. Example: "The mountains were gods looking down on us."
Metonym
Decameter
A poem about heroism or a quest is called a/an _____.
Alexandrine
Epic
Incidentally, don't be fooled by "alexandrine;" the name doesn't refer to Alexander the Great. That's a metrical form with 12-syllable iambic lines. If you've read Shelley's "To a Skylark," you've read one.
Satire
Sonnet
If an epic is meant to be comic, it's called a ______ epic.
Light
Inverse
Mock
Probably the most famous mock epic in English is Alexander Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Don't worry, it's not about an actual rape, but about the cutting off of a lock of a girl's hair, which caused a society scandal in Pope's day.
Non-
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Which of these forms was "imported" to England from Italy?
Dyfalu
Haiku
Sonnet
The sonnet was brought back from England by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a nobleman and poet. The other forms are Welsh, Japanese and French, respectively.
Villainelle
Which of these is NOT a type of sonnet?
Poundian
Ezra Pound was tremendously influential in the world of modern poetry. He does not, however, have a sonnet form named for him.
Petrarchan
Italian
Shakespearean
A foot consisting of one stressed and one unstressed syllable is called a/an ______.
Hand
Iamb
In poetry, a "foot" is a short unit of measure. The iamb, consisting of one unstressed and one stressed syllable, makes for a pleasing rhythm to the ear.
Meter
Yard
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What was the classic meter that Shakespeare usually wrote in called?
Blank verse
Iambic pentameter
Many people who know little about poetry otherwise are familiar with this term. It's a line of 10 syllables, or five iambs.
Dactyls
Anapests
Iambic pentameter that does not rhyme is called ______.
Blank verse
You might have been taught in school that blank verse is any poem with meter but no rhyme. English departments define it more strictly. Many great English poems are in blank verse, including John Milton's "Paradise Lost."
Verse libre
Open verse
Ten-foot verse
A line with six metrical feet is called a ________.
Decameter
Hexameter
"Hexameter" has the same root as "hexagon." This makes it easy to remember.
Iameter
Pentameter
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If a poem's name ends with "-iad," what is it?
A funeral poem
A heroic epic
The most famous example of this is "The Iliad." Nowadays, the name is usually used ironically. We feel certain that somewhere out there, a witty poet is composing a "Trumpiad."
A love poem
A Petrarchan sonnet
Didactic poetry is written to ____.
Dance to
Instruct
"Didactic" has to do with teaching. You might recognize it from art museums, where the "didactic panel" is the text that accompanies a painting or sculpture and tells visitors about what they are viewing.
Mourn
Woo
The opposite of an iamb is a _______.
Dactyl
Anapest
Trochee
Given how many people recognize the "iamb," an unstressed syllable followed by a stress, it's surprising how many people don't know the word "trochee." It just means the opposite: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed.
Head
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What is the term for a poet who represents a city, state or nation?
Polis
Poet Officiale
Poet Laureate
In the past, poets laureates were expected to write commemorative poems for coronations, or to mourn national disasters. Nowadays, it's just a ceremonial position, to show that the government respects and patronizes the arts.
There is no term for this
An "abecedarian" poem whose lines proceed in order through the _______.
Alphabet
You'll often find abecedarian poems in children's books, as a teaching tool. Outside the world of poetry, the late mystery novelist Sue Grafton wrote what could be called an "abecedarian" series of books, starting with "A is for Alibi."
Greek Gods
Norse gods
Zodiac signs
What is an epigram?
A first draft of a poem
A line of poetry or prose that inspired the poem to follow
Prose fiction uses epigrams too, and they can be tricky sometimes. For "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald quoted a poem by "Thomas Park D'Invilliers" -- who wasn't real, but a character in Fitzgerald's earlier work, "This Side of Paradise." So essentially, Fitzgerald wrote his own epigram.
A poem about a dead person
A poem about a fictitious person
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What is a "refrain"?
The opening of the poem
Information left out, that the reader is just expected to understand
A lines or lines that is/are repeated at intervals
Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague" uses this to good effect. Its tightly rhymed stanzas about the inevitability of death each end with "Lord, have mercy on us."
The poem's dedication
Bad poetry is often called ______.
Doggerel
"Doggerel" often refers to light-hearted bad poetry, the kind that rhymes. The term is not often applied to heavy-handed free verse, like the many imitators of Sylvia Plath.
Chaff
Nursery rhyme
Graveyard rhyme
Enjambment is ...
A sentence or thought breaking over two or more lines
"Here rode the 500/High-hearted in strife," is an example of enjambment. This is extremely common in free verse, but you'll also find it in poems with metrical and rhyme schemes.
Assuming knowledge on the part of the reader
Making a part stand for the whole
Having an individual artistic sensibility
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When the word for a sound resembles the sound itself, what is this called?
Mimesis
Metonymy
Onomatopeia
This gives us a chance to share an old joke: "What's round and brown and goes 'spud spud spud'? Onomatopotatoes." (This one kills in English department faculty lounges).
Zeugma
What is the term for a poem's "turning point"?
Chiasmus
Motif
Joint
Volta
"Volta" comes from the Italian word for "turn." It represents the change in tone or feeling in a poem, or its conclusion. In an Elizabethan sonnet, it comes at the final couplet.
Lines honoring a mentor or patron is called an ________.
Epigraph
Invocation
In early poetry, bards would thank their patrons, usually kings or noblemen, who financially supported their work in exchange for poems of praise. Invocations survive today in the world of rap and hip-hop, as the "shoutout" -- like when a young rapper namedrops his producer/mentor.
Vocation
Honorarium
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A pause in midline, for dramatic effect, is called what?
A caesura
This will be familiar to readers of Old English poetry. It commonly has a pause at midline.
An eclogue
A chiasmus
A rift
What is a "spondee"?
A kind of nonsense poetry
A love poem
A poem that ends midsentence
Two stressed syllables in a row
Finishing out our explanation of different kinds of metrical feet (see previously "iamb" and "trochee") is the "spondee." Two stressed syllables in a row is rare, but you might see it in a poem using onomatopeia: "Bang bang, boom boom ..."
Which of these is a term for a lousy poet?
Bard
Lyricist
Poetaster
How'd this one come about? According to Merriam-Webster, in Latin the suffix "-aster" means "partial" or "partway." So a "poetaster" is not quite a poet.
McSweeney
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If you are writing an "elegy," your subject is probably ______.
A child
A lover
A hero
Dead
Elegies are for the dead. Of course, the deceased could be a child, a lover, or a hero. In the days before modern medicine and vaccines, far too many were written about children, like Ben Jonson's "Epitaph on S.B., a Child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel."
A pastoral poem celebrates what?
A clergyman
Religious subjects
Romantic love
Nature and rural life
We owe the pastoral to early Greek poetry, which sometimes imagined the lives of shepherds in an idyllic fictitious land called Arcadia. Pastorals are less popular nowadays, when farming is recognized as hard work that uses a lot of gas-burning machinery.
Which form of poetry commemorates, and sometimes directly addresses, a person or thing?
Elegy
Ode
In Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," he seems to speak to the urn, or at least the figures painted on it: "Ever wilt thou love and she be fair."
Quatrain
Villanelle
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What is the poetic technique that addresses the dead as if living, or absent as if present?
Apostrophe
This term is rarely heard nowadays, but the technique survives. Poems about the dead often address the dead directly, as though they could hear the words.
Epigram
Antonymy
Metonynmy
Poetry in which words almost, but don't quite, rhyme is called what?
Indirect rhyme
Pararhyme
Slant rhyme
Both #2 and #3
This can be a way to take the "nursery rhyme" edge off a poem. In Thomas Harris's novel "The Silence of the Lambs," Clarice Starling's brainy roommate, Ardelia Mapp, "(compares) slant rhymes in Stevie Wonder and Emily Dickinson."
You Got:
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