“Ozymandias” is a famed poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was published in 1818....
1A. Beowulf
Most scholars agree that the longest surviving poem in Old English is Beowulf, a tale of legendary heroes and monsters. It is more than 1,000 years old.
2C. Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias” is a famed poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was published in 1818.
3D. 14
Of all the set patterns in English poetry, the sonnet is the best known. It consists of 14 lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed usually in one of two ways.
4D. Octave
The first eight lines of any sonnet are called the octave, the last six the sestet.
5B. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lord Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to commemorate a battle in the Crimean War.
6C. Two or more syllables
In poetry, the word “foot” refers to two or more syllables. A foot is the smallest unit of poetic meter, and generally consists of one stressed and one or more unstressed syllables.
7B. An acrostic
It is a short verse composition, so constructed that the initial letters of the lines, taken consecutively, form one or more words. Acrostics have been written since ancient times.
8C. E.E. Cummings
The American poet E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) wrote such simple, childlike lines that he used no punctuation or capitalisation.
9D. Stevenson
His epitaph reads:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
10B. Titanic
The “Convergence of the Twain” (Lines on the loss of the Titanic) by Thomas Hardy was published in 1912. It describes the sinking and wreckage of the ocean liner Titanic. Hardy was asked to compose a poem to be read at a charity concert to raise funds in aid of the tragedy disaster fund.
11D. Lord Byron
Novelist and aristocrat, Lady Caroline Lamb, uttered the infamous description of Lord Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.
12B. Gabriela Mistral
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral was a poet, diplomat, educator and humanist. In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature.
