A Study of Poetry

Question: What are the first eight lines of a sonnet called?

Answer: The first eight lines of any sonnet are called the octave, the last six the sestet.

Question: A poem in which the first letters of each line spell a word is called:

Answer: An acrostic 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.

Question: What is the longest Old English poem?

Answer: 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.

Question: In poetry, the word "foot" refers to:

Answer: A foot is the smallest unit of poetic meter, and generally consists of one stressed and one or more unstressed syllables.

Question: How many lines does a sonnet have?

Answer: 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.

Question: Who is the author of "Ozymandias"?

Answer: "Ozymandias" is a famed poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was published in 1818.

Question: Who wrote a famed poem about the Crimean War?

Answer: Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" to commemorate a battle in the Crimean War.

Question: Which of these poets did not use capital letters in his works?

Answer: The American poet E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) wrote such simple, childlike lines that he used no punctuation or capitalization.