Poets and Poems

CLUE: Father of Tragedy | fought at Marathon | killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle | "The Oresteia" | "Prometheus Bound" | "The Persians" | "Seven Against Thebes"

ANSWER: Aeschylus

CLUE: Head librarian at Alexandria | clashed with Callimachus | only surviving Hellenistic epic | "Argonautica" | "The Voyage of Argo" | "The Epigrams" | "Aetia"

ANSWER: Apollonius of Rhodes

CLUE: Wrote the only Latin novel surviving in full | "The Golden Ass" | contains the "Cupid and Psyche" myth | "Apologia" | "Florida" | "De Deo Socratis"

ANSWER: Apuleius

CLUE: Master of Old Comedy | mocked Socrates in the "Thinkery" | mocked Euripides in Hades | "The Clouds" | "The Frogs" | "The Birds" | "Lysistrata"

ANSWER: Aristophanes

CLUE: Student of Plato | tutor to Alexander the Great | defined "catharsis" and "hamartia" | "Poetics" | "Nicomachean Ethics" | "Metaphysics" | "Politics"

ANSWER: Aristotle

CLUE: Neoteric poet | obsessed with "Lesbia" (Clodia) | wrote about her pet sparrow | "Vivamus mea Lesbia" | "Odi et amo" | "Poem 64" | "Carmina"

ANSWER: Catullus

CLUE: Rome's greatest orator | Novus Homo | suppressed Catiline Conspiracy | "Catilinarian Orations" | "Philippics" | "On Duties" | "On the Republic"

ANSWER: Cicero

CLUE: Youngest great Greek tragedian | skeptical of the gods | torn apart by dogs in Macedonia | "Medea" | "The Bacchae" | "Hippolytus" | "The Trojan Women"

ANSWER: Euripides

CLUE: Father of History | chronicled the Persian Wars | nine books named after Muses | "The Histories" | "The Persian Wars" | "Book II on Egypt"

ANSWER: Herodotus

CLUE: Blind Ionian bard | Homeric Question | dactylic hexameter | "The Iliad" | "The Odyssey" | "Homeric Hymns" | "Batrachomyomachia"

ANSWER: Homer

CLUE: Son of a freed slave | patronized by Maecenas | "Carpe diem" | "Odes" | "Satires" | "Ars Poetica" | "Epodes"

ANSWER: Horace

CLUE: Silver Age satirist | "bread and circuses" | "who guards the guardians?" | "Satires" | "Satire VI" (against women) | "Satire X"

ANSWER: Juvenal

CLUE: Greatest Sanskrit dramatist | Indian court of Chandragupta II | "The Recognition of Shakuntala" | "The Cloud Messenger" | "The Birth of the War-God"

ANSWER: Kalidasa

CLUE: Epicurean philosopher-poet | atomic theory | soul dissolves at death | "De Rerum Natura" | "On the Nature of Things" | "The Honey on the Rim"

ANSWER: Lucretius

CLUE: Roman epigrammatist from Spain | famous for wit | "Epigrams" | "Xenia" | "Apophoreta" | "On the Spectacles"

ANSWER: Martial

CLUE: Exiled to Tomis by Augustus | "carmen et error" | fifteen-book epic of transformations | "Metamorphoses" | "Ars Amatoria" | "Heroides" | "Tristia"

ANSWER: Ovid

CLUE: Greatest Greek lyric poet | Alexander spared his house | victory odes | "Olympian Odes" | "Pythian Odes" | "Nemean Odes" | "Isthmian Odes"

ANSWER: Pindar

CLUE: Student of Socrates | founded the Academy | "The Republic" | "Symposium" | "Apology" | "Timaeus" | "Phaedo"

ANSWER: Plato

CLUE: Priest at Delphi | paired biographies | "Parallel Lives" | "Moralia" | "Life of Caesar" | "The Roman Questions"

ANSWER: Plutarch

CLUE: Latin elegist | obsessed with "Cynthia" | contemporary of Virgil | "Elegies" | "Cynthia Monobiblos" | "Propemptikon"

ANSWER: Propertius

CLUE: The "Tenth Muse" | lived on Lesbos | Sapphic meter | "Ode to Aphrodite" | "Fragment 31" | "Fragment 16" | "Midnight Poem"

ANSWER: Sappho

CLUE: Stoic tutor to Nero | forced suicide | extreme violence in closet dramas | "Thyestes" | "Phaedra" | "Medea" | "Apocolocyntosis"

ANSWER: Seneca the Younger

CLUE: Won 24 dramatic competitions | introduced third actor | expanded chorus to 15 | "Oedipus Rex" | "Antigone" | "Electra" | "Philoctetes"

ANSWER: Sophocles

CLUE: Athenian general exiled | interviewed participants of the war | "History of the Peloponnesian War" | "Melian Dialogue" | "Pericles' Funeral Oration"

ANSWER: Thucydides

CLUE: Latin elegist | "Corpus Tibullianum" | obsessed with "Delia" | "Panegyric of Messalla" | "Elegies" | "Nemesis"

ANSWER: Tibullus

CLUE: Premier Augustan poet | Aeneas carries Anchises | "Arma virumque cano" | "The Aeneid" | "Eclogues" | "Georgics" | "Appendix Vergiliana"

ANSWER: Virgil

CLUE: Early Italian humanist | "The Decameron" | friend of Petrarch | "On the Fates of Famous Men" | "Filostrato" | "Teseida"

ANSWER: Giovanni Boccaccio

CLUE: Father of English poetry | Tabard Inn | pilgrimage to Becket's shrine | "The Canterbury Tales" | "Troilus and Criseyde" | "The Book of the Duchess"

ANSWER: Geoffrey Chaucer

CLUE: White Guelph exiled from Florence | guided by Virgil then Beatrice | "The Divine Comedy" | "Inferno" | "Purgatorio" | "Paradiso" | "La Vita Nuova"

ANSWER: Dante Alighieri

CLUE: Early French rogue poet | convicted of theft | "The Grand Testament" | "Ballade des pendus" | "Le Petit Testament" | "Legacy"

ANSWER: Francois Villon

CLUE: Portuguese national poet | lost an eye in battle | epic of Vasco da Gama | "The Lusiads" | "The Parnasum" | "Rimas"

ANSWER: Luis de Camoes

CLUE: French Renaissance leader | "The Defense and Illustration of the French Language" | "Les Regrets" | "Les Antiquités de Rome" | "Olive"

ANSWER: Joachim du Bellay

CLUE: Metaphysical founder | Dean of St. Paul's | "The Flea" | "Death, be not proud" | "Holy Sonnets" | "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

ANSWER: John Donne

CLUE: Cavalier poet | "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" | "Gather ye rosebuds" | "Hesperides" | "Noble Numbers" | "Upon Julia's Clothes"

ANSWER: Robert Herrick

CLUE: Cavalier poet | "To Althea, from Prison" | "Stone walls do not a prison make" | "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" | "Lucasta" | "The Grasshopper"

ANSWER: Richard Lovelace

CLUE: Metaphysical poet | "To His Coy Mistress" | "The Garden" | "An Horatian Ode" | "Upon Appleton House" | "Last Instructions to a Painter"

ANSWER: Andrew Marvell

CLUE: Secretary to Cromwell | blind poet | justify the ways of God to men | "Paradise Lost" | "Lycidas" | "Areopagitica" | "Samson Agonistes"

ANSWER: John Milton

CLUE: Father of Humanism | obsessed with "Laura" | crowned Laureate in Rome | "Il Canzoniere" | "Africa" | "Secretum" | "Trionfi"

ANSWER: Petrarch

CLUE: French Neoclassical master | "Phèdre" | "Andromaque" | "Britannicus" | "Athalie" | "Esther"

ANSWER: Jean Racine

CLUE: French Renaissance | leader of "La Pléiade" | "Sonnets for Helene" | "The Franciad" | "Odes" | "Cassandre"

ANSWER: Pierre de Ronsard

CLUE: Poet's Poet | lived in Ireland | Kilcolman Castle burned | "The Faerie Queene" | "Amoretti" | "Epithalamion" | "Prothalamion"

ANSWER: Edmund Spenser

CLUE: Engraver and painter | visions of angels | "Songs of Innocence and Experience" | "The Tyger" | "The Lamb" | "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

ANSWER: William Blake

CLUE: National poet of Scotland | "Auld Lang Syne" | "To a Mouse" | "Tam o' Shanter" | "A Red, Red Rose" | "Holy Willie's Prayer"

ANSWER: Robert Burns

CLUE: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" | died in Greece | "Don Juan" | "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" | "She Walks in Beauty" | "Manfred"

ANSWER: Lord Byron

CLUE: Opium addicted Romantic | "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" | "Kubla Khan" | "Biographia Literaria" | "Christabel" | "Dejection: An Ode"

ANSWER: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CLUE: Master of the Heroic Couplet | Catholic satirist | only 4'6" tall | "The Rape of the Lock" | "An Essay on Man" | "The Dunciad"

ANSWER: Alexander Pope

CLUE: Romantic "Ode" master | trained as apothecary | "Beauty is truth" | "Ode on a Grecian Urn" | "Ode to a Nightingale" | "Endymion" | "To Autumn"

ANSWER: John Keats

CLUE: Expelled for "The Necessity of Atheism" | drowned in Italy | "Ozymandias" | "Ode to the West Wind" | "Adonais" | "Prometheus Unbound"

ANSWER: Percy Bysshe Shelley

CLUE: Scottish poet | "The Seasons" | wrote "Rule, Britannia!" | "The Castle of Indolence" | "Liberty" | "The City of Dreadful Night"

ANSWER: James Thomson

CLUE: Lake Poet | "Lyrical Ballads" | Dove Cottage | "I wandered lonely as a cloud" | "Tintern Abbey" | "The Prelude" | "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"

ANSWER: William Wordsworth

CLUE: Victorian poet | "Dover Beach" | "The Scholar-Gipsy" | "Culture and Anarchy" | Inspector of Schools | "Thyrsis" | "Empedocles on Etna"

ANSWER: Matthew Arnold

CLUE: "Flowers of Evil" | prosecuted for obscenity | "Les Fleurs du mal" | "The Painter of Modern Life" | "The Albatross" | "The Swan"

ANSWER: Charles Baudelaire

CLUE: Invalid confined to house | eloped with Robert | "How do I love thee?" | "Sonnets from the Portuguese" | "Aurora Leigh" | "Casa Guidi Windows"

ANSWER: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

CLUE: Master of dramatic monologue | "My Last Duchess" | "Porphyria's Lover" | "The Ring and the Book" | "Fra Lippo Lippi" | "Men and Women"

ANSWER: Robert Browning

CLUE: Belle of Amherst | dashes and slant rhyme | "Because I could not stop for Death" | "I heard a Fly buzz when I died" | "Success is counted sweetest" | "Hope is the thing with feathers"

ANSWER: Emily Dickinson

CLUE: Victorian translator | "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" | "Euphranor" | "Polonius" | "Salaman and Absal"

ANSWER: Edward FitzGerald

CLUE: Jesuit priest | "sprung rhythm" | burned early work | "The Windhover" | "Pied Beauty" | "God's Grandeur" | "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

ANSWER: Gerard Manley Hopkins

CLUE: Latin professor at Cambridge | "A Shropshire Lad" | "To an Athlete Dying Young" | "When I was one-and-twenty" | "Terence, this is stupid stuff"

ANSWER: A.E. Housman

CLUE: Fireside Poet | "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" | "The Song of Hiawatha" | "Evangeline" | "Voices of the Night" | "The Village Blacksmith"

ANSWER: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

CLUE: Symbolist hosted salons | "The Afternoon of a Faun" | "Un Coup de Dés" | "Herodiade" | "Toast Funebre"

ANSWER: Stephane Mallarme

CLUE: Symbolist prodigy | retired at 21 | affair with Verlaine | "A Season in Hell" | "Illuminations" | "The Drunken Boat"

ANSWER: Arthur Rimbaud

CLUE: Pre-Raphaelite | sister of Dante Gabriel | "Goblin Market" | "Remember" | "In the Bleak Midwinter" | "The Prince's Progress"

ANSWER: Christina Rossetti

CLUE: Longest serving Poet Laureate | "The Charge of the Light Brigade" | "Ulysses" | "In Memoriam A.H.H." | "Idylls of the King" | "The Lady of Shalott"

ANSWER: Alfred Lord Tennyson

CLUE: Victorian Catholic | "The Hound of Heaven" | "The Kingdom of God" | "Sister Songs" | "New Poems"

ANSWER: Francis Thompson

CLUE: Symbolist shot Rimbaud | "Saturnian Poems" | "Romances sans paroles" | "Art Poétique" | "Sagesse" | "Fetes galantes"

ANSWER: Paul Verlaine

CLUE: Good Gray Poet | nurse in Civil War | "Song of Myself" | "I Sing the Body Electric" | "O Captain My Captain" | "Leaves of Grass"

ANSWER: Walt Whitman

CLUE: Aestheticist playwright | "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" | "The Sphinx" | "De Profundis" | "The Harlot's House"

ANSWER: Oscar Wilde

CLUE: Read at Maya Angelou's inauguration (No, read at JFK's) | four Pulitzers | "The Road Not Taken" | "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" | "Mending Wall" | "Birches"

ANSWER: Robert Frost

CLUE: Read at Maya Angelou's inauguration (Actually Maya Angelou) | "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" | "On the Pulse of Morning" | "And Still I Rise" | "Phenomenal Woman"

ANSWER: Maya Angelou

CLUE: New York School leader | "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" | "Flow Chart" | "Some Trees" | "The Skaters" | "A Wave"

ANSWER: John Ashbery

CLUE: Part of "Oxford Group" | "Musée des Beaux Arts" | "Funeral Blues" | "September 1, 1939" | "The Age of Anxiety" | "The Shield of Achilles"

ANSWER: W.H. Auden

CLUE: Confessional poet | jumped from bridge | "The Dream Songs" | "77 Dream Songs" | "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" | "The Dispossessed"

ANSWER: John Berryman

CLUE: Won Pulitzer for "North & South" | "One Art" | "The Fish" | "The Armadillo" | "Questions of Travel" | "Geography III"

ANSWER: Elizabeth Bishop

CLUE: First Black Pulitzer winner | "A Street in Bronzeville" | "Annie Allen" | "The Bean Eaters" | "We Real Cool" | "Maud Martha"

ANSWER: Gwendolyn Brooks

CLUE: Typographical innovator | "anyone lived in a pretty how town" | "i carry your heart with me" | "The Enormous Room" | "Tulips and Chimneys" | "XLI Poems"

ANSWER: E.E. Cummings

CLUE: High Modernist converted to Anglicanism | "The Waste Land" | "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" | "Four Quartets" | "The Hollow Men" | "Ash Wednesday"

ANSWER: T.S. Eliot

CLUE: Beat Generation leader | "Howl" | "Kaddish" | "A Supermarket in California" | "Sunflower Sutra" | "Plutonian Ode"

ANSWER: Allen Ginsberg

CLUE: Harlem Renaissance leader | "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" | "Harlem" | "The Weary Blues" | "I, Too" | "The Big Sea"

ANSWER: Langston Hughes

CLUE: Poet Laureate married Plath | "Birthday Letters" | "The Hawk in the Rain" | "Crow" | "Lupercal" | "Gaudete"

ANSWER: Ted Hughes

CLUE: "Spoon River Anthology" | "The New Star Chamber" | "Domesday Book" | "The Great Valley" | "Songs and Satires"

ANSWER: Edgar Lee Masters

CLUE: First woman to win Pulitzer for Poetry | "Renascence" | "A Few Figs from Thistles" | "The Harp-Weaver" | "Fatal Interview" | "The Buck in the Snow"

ANSWER: Edna St. Vincent Millay

CLUE: Tricorn hat and baseball fan | "Poetry" | "The Steeple-Jack" | "To a Snail" | "Observations" | "What Are Years"

ANSWER: Marianne Moore

CLUE: Central Modernist arrested for treason | "Make it New" | "The Cantos" | "In a Station of the Metro" | "The Seafarer" | "ABC of Reading"

ANSWER: Ezra Pound

CLUE: Secretary to Rodin | "Duino Elegies" | "Sonnets to Orpheus" | "Letters to a Young Poet" | "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" | "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

ANSWER: Rainer Maria Rilke

CLUE: Biographer of Lincoln | "Chicago" | "Fog" | "The People, Yes" | "Rootabaga Stories" | "Cornhuskers"

ANSWER: Carl Sandburg

CLUE: Hartford insurance exec | "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" | "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" | "Sunday Morning" | "Harmonium" | "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

ANSWER: Wallace Stevens

CLUE: Bard of Bengal | "Gitanjali" | "The Home and the World" | "The Post Office" | "Gora" | "The Gardener"

ANSWER: Rabindranath Tagore

CLUE: Heavy drinker died in NY | "Fern Hill" | "Do not go gentle into that good night" | "Under Milk Wood" | "The Force That Through the Green Fuse" | "A Child's Christmas in Wales"

ANSWER: Dylan Thomas

CLUE: Pediatrician Imagist | "The Red Wheelbarrow" | "This Is Just To Say" | "Paterson" | "Spring and All" | "The Desert Music"

ANSWER: William Carlos Williams

CLUE: Obsessed with Maud Gonne | "The Second Coming" | "Sailing to Byzantium" | "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" | "Leda and the Swan" | "The Tower"

ANSWER: W.B. Yeats

CLUE: Acmeist poet | "Requiem" | "Poem Without a Hero" | "Evening" | "Rosary" | "The White Flock"

ANSWER: Anna Akhmatova

CLUE: Nobel from Northern Ireland | bog poems | "Digging" | "Mid-Term Break" | "Death of a Naturalist" | "Beowulf" (translation) | "Seamus Famous"

ANSWER: Seamus Heaney

CLUE: Movement librarian | "The Whitsun Weddings" | "High Windows" | "This Be The Verse" | "Church Going" | "Aubade"

ANSWER: Philip Larkin

CLUE: Confessional leader | "Life Studies" | "Skunk Hour" | "For the Union Dead" | "The Dolphin" | "Lord Weary's Castle"

ANSWER: Robert Lowell

CLUE: Chilean diplomat | green ink | "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" | "Canto General" | "Elemental Odes" | "Residence on Earth"

ANSWER: Pablo Neruda

CLUE: Smuggled manuscript | Lara Antipova | "Doctor Zhivago" | "My Sister, Life" | "The Last Summer" | "The Year 1905" | "Second Birth"

ANSWER: Boris Pasternak

CLUE: Married Ted Hughes | "The Bell Jar" | "Daddy" | "Lady Lazarus" | "Ariel" | "Colossus" | "Tulips"

ANSWER: Sylvia Plath

CLUE: Feminist/Confessional | "Diving into the Wreck" | "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" | "A Change of World" | "Of Woman Born" | "The Dream of a Common Language"

ANSWER: Adrienne Rich

CLUE: Confessional poet | therapy started writing | "To Bedlam and Part Way Back" | "Live or Die" | "The Death Notebooks" | "All My Pretty Ones" | "Mercy Street"

ANSWER: Anne Sexton

CLUE: Caribbean Nobel | Homer in Caribbean | "Omeros" | "The Schooner Flight" | "Dream on Monkey Mountain" | "White Egrets"

ANSWER: Derek Walcott