Poetry Quiz

1. A poem features one fictional speaker addressing a silent listener and unintentionally revealing aspects of the speaker’s character. Which form best fits this description?

2. A first-person poem describes stealing a horse. Without outside evidence, what is the soundest conclusion?

3. A passage is written in regular iambic pentameter but does not use end rhyme. What kind of verse is it?

4. Who wrote the poem “Still I Rise”?

5. Who wrote the epic poem “Paradise Lost”?

6. When a line follows an unstressed-stressed rhythm five times, which meter does it use?

7. Who wrote the narrative poem “The Raven”?

8. In a sonnet, the speaker first presents a problem and then shifts toward a new perspective or response. What is this structural turn called?

9. Which device appears in the line “The lake glittered like scattered glass”?

10. A sentence continues across a line break without punctuation or a grammatical pause. What technique is being used?

11. Which rhyme scheme is characteristic of a Shakespearean sonnet?

12. In the line “The moon is a silver coin,” which device provides the central comparison?

13. The ancient Greek epic “The Odyssey” is traditionally attributed to which poet?

14. Which word pair is the clearest example of slant or near rhyme rather than exact rhyme?

15. In “Silver sails slipped silently seaward,” what device is created by the repeated initial “s” sound?

16. Which stress pattern defines one iamb?