Free Poetry MCQs with Answers

• A. P.B. Shelley
• B. Charles Lamb
• C. Hazlitt
• D. Coleridge

Explanation: P. B. Shelley was sent down from Oxford after circulating The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet defending scepticism about religious…

• A. Keats
• B. Byron
• C. Shelley
• D. Wordsworth

Explanation: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sensuous imagery, medievalism, and emphasis on beauty show a strong kinship with John Keats.

• A. William Wordsworth
• B. P.B Shelley
• C. S. T. Coleridge
• D. John Keats

Explanation: John Keats coined “the egotistical sublime” in a letter while discussing Wordsworth’s poetry, referring to the powerful presence of the…

• A. more Latin than most poems
• B. more spontaneous than thought out
• C. more satirical than spontaneous
• D. more dramatic than lyrical

Explanation: Paradise Lost has a highly learned style shaped by Latin syntax, vocabulary, and classical references, making it more Latinized than most…

• A. Dramatis Personae
• B. Dramatic Idyls
• C. Asolando
• D. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country

Explanation: “Rabbi Ben Ezra” is one of Browning’s dramatic monologues in Dramatis Personae, published in 1864.

• A. Wordsworth
• B. Coleridge
• C. Lamb
• D. Shelley

Explanation: Shelley admired Keats’s Hellenic spirit and is credited with describing him as Greek.

• A. Immortality Ode
• B. Tintern Abbey
• C. The Second Coming
• D. Leda and the Swan

Explanation: The line appears in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” commonly called the “Immortality Ode.” It expresses the poem’s belief…

• A. Satire
• B. Sensuality
• C. Sensuousness
• D. Social reform

Explanation: Keats’s poetry is especially marked by sensuousness, meaning rich appeals to sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.

• A. The Waste Land
• B. Tintern Abbey
• C. The Second Coming
• D. Prayer for My Daughter

Explanation: These lines come from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” where the collapse of order is shown through the weakness of the good and the violent…

• A. Rime royal
• B. Ottava rima
• C. Terza rima
• D. Spenserian Stanza

Explanation: “Ode to the West Wind” consists of five sections written in terza rima, the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme associated with Dante.

• A. Wordsworth
• B. Shelley
• C. Keats
• D. Coleridge

Explanation: Wordsworth describes poetry as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

• A. Sir Thomas Wyatt
• B. William Shakespeare
• C. Earl of Surrey
• D. Milton

Explanation: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced blank verse into English poetry through his translation of parts of Virgil’s Aeneid.

• A. Work Without Hope
• B. Frost at Midnight
• C. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• D. Youth and Age

Explanation: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a celebrated supernatural ballad, using narrative storytelling, repetition, striking imagery, and…

• A. Nature
• B. Dorothy
• C. Coleridge
• D. Wye

Explanation: In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy as his “dearest Friend,” linking her presence with his memories of nature.

• A. Hopkins
• B. Tennyson
• C. Browning
• D. Wordsworth

Explanation: Gerard Manley Hopkins coined and used the term “sprung rhythm” for a flexible rhythm based on stressed syllables rather than regular…

• A. The Bible
• B. The Irish mythology
• C. The German mythology
• D. The Greek mythology

Explanation: Yeats's “The Second Coming” takes its title from the Christian biblical belief in Christ's return, or Second Coming.

• A. Oedipus
• B. Grail Legend of Fisher King
• C. Philomela
• D. Sysyphus

Explanation: The Waste Land draws on the Fisher King and Grail legend and retells the Philomela story, while Sisyphus is not part of Eliot's poem.

• A. Tennyson
• B. Browning
• C. Swinburne
• D. D.G. Rossetti

Explanation: D. G. Rossetti is associated with intensely personal poems of love, bereavement and artistic loss, which explains Queen Victoria’s…

• A. Jonson
• B. Bacon
• C. Wordsworth
• D. none of above

Explanation: The lines come from Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr.

• A. 1938
• B. 1925
• C. 1932
• D. 1923

Explanation: W. B. Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, recognised for poetry that gives expression to the spirit of an entire nation.