National Poetry Month Quiz – Answer Key

1. I am an allegory.
For example: George Orwell's Animal Farm.

2. I am alliteration.
For example: "Let us go forth to lead the land we love."
–J. F. Kennedy's Inaugural Speech

3. I am an allusion.
For example: "He was more wronged than Job."
–James Tate, "The Lost Pilot"

4. I am an anaphora.
For example: "For everything there is a season, and a time
for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
what is planted;..."
–Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

5. I am assonance.
For example: "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride."
–Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee"

6. I am blank verse.
For example: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun."
–Robert Frost, "The Mending Wall"

7. I am a couplet.
For example: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

8. I am an epic.
For example: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

9. I am epizeuxis.
For example: "Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink."
–Samuel Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

10. I am a narrative poem.
For example: Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Laon and Cythna."

11. I am free verse.
For example: "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam..."
–Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing"

12. I am a haiku.
For example: "A giant firefly:
that way, this way, that way, this –
and it passes by."
–Issa

13. I am an idyll.
For example: Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."

14. I am a metaphor.
For example: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."
–Dylan Thomas, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"

15. I am meter.

16. I am an ode.
For example: John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

17. I am onomatopoeia.
For example: Pop, sizzle, and zip.

18. I am a simile.
For example: "Oh, my love is like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June
Oh, my love is like a melody
That's sweetly played in tune"
–Robert Burns, "Oh, my love is like a red, red rose"

19. I am a sonnet.
For example: Shakespeare's sonnets.

20. I am verse.

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