Memorize these and you could recognize 30.2% of all Poetry clues.
| # | Answer | Appearances | Sample Clue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Robert Frost | 53 | "The Road Not Taken" is the opening poem in his "Mountain Interval" |
| 2 | Emily Dickinson | 42 | Poetess who wrote "I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you--nobody--too?" |
| 3 | Walt Whitman | 38 | His nickname, "The Good Gray Poet", came from a pamphlet that defended his "Leaves of Grass" |
| 4 | Robert Burns | 31 | This Scottish poet wrote an ode to "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785" |
| 5 | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 29 | He was a descendant of John & Priscilla Alden, whose love story he told in an 1858 narrative poem |
| 6 | Elizabeth Barrett Browning | 28 | After marrying a poet, this poetess wrote, "Papa thinks that I have sold my soul - for genius" |
| 7 | John Keats | 27 | After his death in 1821, a fellow poet wrote that he was fragile & was "killed off by one critique" |
| 8 | William Wordsworth | 25 | In 1787 he signed his first published poem "Axiologus"; axio- is from the Greek for "worth" |
| 9 | Carl Sandburg | 24 | This poet was born in Galesburg, Illinois to a Swedish immigrant whose original name was Danielson |
| 10 | Percy Shelley | 23 | In 1811 this poet was expelled from Oxford for writing the pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism" |
| 11 | T.S. Eliot | 22 | He began his 1st major poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", with a quote from Dante's "Inferno" |
| 12 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 22 | This "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" author called his critics "Murderers!" |
| 13 | Allen Ginsberg | 21 | Mark Van Doren & Lionel Trilling both taught this "Howl"ing poet when he studied at Columbia |
| 14 | Edgar Allan Poe | 21 | This poet's novella "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" inspired Melville's "Moby Dick" |
| 15 | Tennyson | 20 | He penned, "Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred" |
| 16 | Lord Byron | 19 | English poet who wrote, "She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies" |
| 17 | John Donne | 18 | "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind" precedes a famous line from his works |
| 18 | Dylan Thomas | 17 | "Do not go gentle into that good night" was written during his father's fatal illness |
| 19 | Sylvia Plath | 17 | The poems in her 1971 collection "Winter Trees" date from the last year of her life |
| 20 | John Milton | 17 | In "On His Blindness" this blind poet wrote, "They also serve who only stand and wait" |
| 21 | Ogden Nash | 15 | He wrote the humorous verse "I don't mind eels except as meals" |
| 22 | William Butler Yeats | 15 | "Let the Irish vessel lie emptied of its poetry", Auden wrote "In Memory" of him |
| 23 | Dante | 14 | Since it was written in the 1st person, he's regarded as the leading character in "The Divine Comedy" |
| 24 | Robert Browning | 12 | The town of Pippapass, Ky. was renamed Pippa Passes after a verse drama by this Englishman |
| 25 | Edna St. Vincent Millay | 12 | This Maine poetess sometimes wrote under the shorter pen name Nancy Boyd |
| 26 | E.E. Cummings | 12 | In 1953 his Norton Lectures at Harvard were published as "i: six nonlectures" |
| 27 | William Shakespeare | 12 | One reason he is not buried in Westminster Abbey is his epitaph, which concludes, "Curst be he that moves my bones" |
| 28 | Langston Hughes | 11 | A leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, he wrote, "I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother" |
| 29 | Geoffrey Chaucer | 11 | Before this poet died on October 25, 1400, he was living in a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey |
| 30 | Evangeline | 10 | In Longfellow's poem, she was the long-lost love of Gabriel Lajeunesse |
| 31 | Alexander Pope | 10 | In 1712 he published his first version of "The Rape of the Lock" |
| 32 | Joyce Kilmer | 9 | His wife, Aline Kilmer, was a poet, too |
| 33 | Annabel Lee | 9 | Name which ends the line "For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful..." |
| 34 | Emma Lazarus | 9 | Poet who, in 1883, penned the words "I lift my lamp beside the golden door" |
| 35 | William Blake | 9 | His poem, "The Tyger", begins "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night" |
| 36 | Rudyard Kipling | 9 | He wrote, "'Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!'" |
| 37 | Sappho | 8 | The story that this ancient Greek poetess drowned herself for love of Phaon is probably untrue |
| 38 | Paul Revere | 8 | In the famous poem, he was "ready to ride & spread the alarm through every Middlesex village & farm" |
| 39 | Ezra Pound | 8 | He wrote many of the later "cantos" in St. Elizabeth's Hosp. where he was a mental patient for 12 yrs. |
| 40 | Maya Angelou | 8 | Her: "Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise" |
| 41 | haiku | 7 | 3-line Japanese poem with 5 syllables in the first & third line, & 7 syllables in the second |
| 42 | Dorothy Parker | 7 | "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses" |
| 43 | Death | 7 | Alan Seeger had "a rendezvous with it" & met it in WWI in the fields of France |
| 44 | Ben Jonson | 7 | Robert Herrick's ode to this poet begins, "Ah, Ben! Say how or when..." |
| 45 | Alfred Lord Tennyson | 7 | He also wrote "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade" |
| 46 | The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | 7 | Part II of this Coleridge poem ends, "Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung" |
| 47 | W.H. Auden | 7 | "Earth, receive an honoured guest; Wm. Yeats is laid to rest: let the Irish vessel lie emptied of its poetry" |
| 48 | Thomas Gray | 7 | The last section of his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is called "The Epitaph" |
| 49 | Virgil | 6 | Emperor Augustus overturned this poet's request that his "Aeneid" be destroyed after his death |
| 50 | Oliver Wendell Holmes | 6 | "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high..." |