- The lines "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree" were written by US poet Joyce Kilmer. Which of the following is not true about Kilmer?
- A. Kilmer was a man who died in battle during World War I.
- B. Kilmer was a woman who frequented the Algonquin Round Table in the 1930s.
- C. There is a rest stop named after Kilmer on the New Jersey Turnpike.
- True or false: Vidal Sassoon was an English poet known for his pacifism.
- Captain John D. McCrae (1872-1918) wrote In Flanders Fields to commemorate the lost soldiers of World War I. Which country is Flanders in?
- A. Belgium
- B. Netherlands
- C. Sweden
- True or false: Caribbean poet Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature
- Which of the following was not written by Canadian poet Robert W. Service (1874-1958)?
- A. Cremation of Sam McGee
- B. The Shooting of Dan McGrew
- C. The Call of the Wild
- Pablo Neruda won the 1971 Nobel Prize in literature. True or false: During his lifetime, Neruda remained an honored citizen in his home country of Chile.
- Rubén Darío (1867-1916) was considered the finest poet writing in the Spanish language at the turn of the century. Which country was he from?
- A. Bolivia
- B. Dominican Republic
- C. Nicaragua
- True or false: Several US beat poets of the 1950s lived and worked in Mexico.
- South Africa has produced a number of internationally known writers, such as J.M. Coetzee (born 1940) and Nadine Gordimer (born 1923), as well as some accomplished poets. Who among the following is not a South African poet?
- A. Chinua Achebe
- B. Breyten Breytenbach
- C. Roy Campbell
- Scots author Robert Burns (1759-1796) wrote such well-known poems as Merry Hae I Been Teethin a Heckle. True or false: Burns wrote his poems in Gaelic.
Answers
- B. A war hero born in New Jersey, Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), has a turnpike rest stop named after him. The lines are from his poem Trees.
- False. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was an English poet who became a pacifist after serving in World War I. Vidal Sassoon sells hair-care products.
- A.
- True. Walcott, born in 1930 in St. Lucia, studied and worked in Jamaica and won the Nobel in 1992.
- C. This short novel was written by another author associated with the Yukon, US author Jack London (1876-1916).
- False. A Communist, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was in exile from 1948 to 1952. The 1995 film Il Postino (The Postman) was based on his life.
- C. Darío is also credited with leading the modernism movement of Spanish American literature.
- True. Among others, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and William S. Burroughs (born 1914) lived in Mexico.
- A. Achebe (born 1930) is Nigeria's most famous novelist.
- False. Burns wrote in dialect, but the language was English.