21 April 2014

For something different, try a poetry quiz


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.

6 comments:

  1. Only 7 out of 10. As I was guessing on five of those, that's not a bad score. :)

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  2. Speaking 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?

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    1. Presumably you went to high school in the 80s-90s? What poems did you read for school in that era?

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    2. We didn't really do poetry at all. It was mostly reading novels and writing reports about them.

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    3. I 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.

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  3. Ten 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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