The Oxford Dictionaries site asks you to match ten opening lines with the titles of the poems. The first 6-7 should be easy; then it will probably get more difficult.
Afterwards, perhaps you can help them locate the source of a 17th-century quotation about sundial makes.
Only 7 out of 10. As I was guessing on five of those, that's not a bad score. :)
ReplyDeleteSpeaking as a Gen Xer, we learned none of these poems in school. I scored 0/10. Is this something that was taught in the 60s?
ReplyDeletePresumably you went to high school in the 80s-90s? What poems did you read for school in that era?
DeleteWe didn't really do poetry at all. It was mostly reading novels and writing reports about them.
DeleteI see. And in answer to your original question - yes, poetry was considered an essential part of learning English literature in the 1960s. Milton was probably not traditionally taught until the collegiate years.
DeleteTen out of ten. Of course, it helped that the test was multiple choice. After I got the ones I knew, the rest were fairly easy to guess. I've read only about three or four of the poems, and other works by the same authors for another two or three. I graduated (Catholic) high school in 1975, and I think the only poems in the list that we were assigned to read were the Eliot and the Shakespeare.
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