Free Poetry MCQs with Answers

889 Poetry MCQs from English Literature, each with the correct answer and a written explanation of why it is correct. Free and unlimited, with no account needed.

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889 questions · page 5 of 45

  • A. Shakespeare
  • B. wordsworth
  • C. John Keats
  • D. Eliot

Explanation: The line appears at the conclusion of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where it links artistic beauty with philosophical truth.

Correct answer: John Keats
  • A. the best poet of the country
  • B. a winner of Noble Prize in Poetry
  • C. the court poet of England
  • D. a classical poet

Explanation: The Poet Laureate is an officially appointed poet associated with the British monarch and royal court.

Correct answer: the court poet of England
  • A. Coleridge
  • B. Shelley
  • C. Wordsworth
  • D. Keats

Explanation: Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan,” a famous Romantic poem known for its dreamlike imagery and supernatural atmosphere.

Correct answer: Coleridge
  • A. Christ
  • B. Satan
  • C. The Paritan Church
  • D. None of these

Explanation: Christ is the hero of Milton's Paradise Regained because the poem presents his successful resistance to Satan's temptations in the…

Correct answer: Christ
  • A. Alfred Tennyson
  • B. Robert Browning
  • C. Mathew Arnold
  • D. John Donne

Explanation: Robert Browning wrote The Patriot, a dramatic monologue narrated by a fallen public hero reflecting on his sudden change in fortune.

Correct answer: Robert Browning
  • A. a history by Vincent Smith
  • B. a verse by Coleridge
  • C. a drama by Oscar Wilde
  • D. a short story by Somerset Maugham

Explanation: Kubla Khan is a famous fragmentary poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, noted for its dreamlike imagery and musical language.

Correct answer: a verse by Coleridge
  • A. John Keats
  • B. William Wordsworth
  • C. William Blake
  • D. Thomas Gray

Explanation: William Wordsworth defended the use of the language of ordinary rural people in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Correct answer: William Wordsworth
  • A. A Sonnet
  • B. An Ode
  • C. A ballad
  • D. None of these

Explanation: A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, usually written in a regular rhyme scheme and often expressing a concentrated thought or argument.

Correct answer: A Sonnet
  • A. William Wordsworth
  • B. William Congreve
  • C. William Blake
  • D. William Shakespeare

Explanation: “Written in March” is a nature poem by William Wordsworth, whose poetry frequently records seasonal change and the restorative power of…

Correct answer: William Wordsworth
  • A. The Rape of Lock
  • B. The Deserted Village
  • C. Spectator
  • D. Man was made to mourn

Explanation: Alexander Pope is best known for The Rape of the Lock, a mock-epic poem satirising upper-class manners.

Correct answer: The Rape of Lock
  • A. ugly dance
  • B. nonsense dance
  • C. lively dance
  • D. nice dance

Explanation: In Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” “sprightly dance” means a lively, energetic movement, describing the daffodils appearing to dance in the…

Correct answer: lively dance
  • A. an ode
  • B. an elegy
  • C. a sonnet
  • D. neither

Explanation: Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. is an elegy, a poem of mourning written after the death of his friend Arthur Hallam.

Correct answer: an elegy
  • A. Wordsworth
  • B. Shelley
  • C. Shakespeare
  • D. Keats

Explanation: John Keats wrote this ode, using the Grecian urn to explore beauty, art, and permanence.

Correct answer: Keats
  • A. a history by Vincent Smith
  • B. a verse by Coleridge
  • C. a drama by Oscar Wilde
  • D. a short story by Somerset Maugham

Explanation: Kubla Khan is a famous fragmentary poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beginning with the description of Xanadu.

Correct answer: a verse by Coleridge
  • A. Edmund Walter
  • B. Jonathan Swift
  • C. Alexander Pope
  • D. Dr. Samuel Johnson

Explanation: Alexander Pope is called the mock-heroic poet because works such as The Rape of the Lock use grand epic style to treat a trivial social…

Correct answer: Alexander Pope
  • A. Blake
  • B. Byron
  • C. Tennyson
  • D. Walter Scott

Explanation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel is a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott, whose historical romances and verse drew heavily on Scottish legend…

Correct answer: Walter Scott
  • A. Milton
  • B. Wordsworth
  • C. G. Chaucer
  • D. Charles Dickens

Explanation: Geoffrey Chaucer is called the father of English poetry because his major works helped establish English as a serious literary language…

Correct answer: G. Chaucer
  • A. Ezra Pound
  • B. Shaw
  • C. Hardy
  • D. none of these

Explanation: T. S. Eliot was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, who helped edit The Waste Land and supported Eliot’s development as a modernist poet.

Correct answer: Ezra Pound
  • A. To a skylark
  • B. The Daffodils
  • C. Pride and Prejudice
  • D. Culture and Anarchy

Explanation: “To a Skylark” is Shelley’s lyric poem celebrating the skylark as a symbol of pure, spontaneous song.

Correct answer: To a skylark
  • A. Robert Browning
  • B. Robert Frost
  • C. both A and B
  • D. none of these

Explanation: “After Apple-Picking” is Robert Frost’s dramatic lyric about exhaustion, work and the uncertain boundary between sleep and death.

Correct answer: Robert Frost