Poets

This page is concerned with questions that are specifically about poets – including poets laureate and who wrote what poem.

For questions of the type "Which poem includes the line(s) ... ?", see Poems.

For anything else that you might get asked about poetry (including terminology, poems and collections of poetry, and details of the contents of poems), see Poetry.

Poets Laureate

Gulielmus Peregrinus was appointed "versificator regis" (King's poet) to		Richard I
According to Wikipedia, the term 'Poet Laureate' dates from the appointment of Bernard André, a French Augustine friar, as an official chronicler of the reign of		Henry VII
Often called the first Poet Laureate – granted a pension by James I of England in 1619		Ben Jonson
Godson of Shakespeare (rumoured – probably falsely – to be his "natural" son); succeeded Jonson following the latter's death in 1637		William Davenant
The first official Poet Laureate (1668–89 – title conferred by letters patent)		John Dryden
(Various incumbents 1689–1813)
1813–43		Robert Southey
1843–50		William Wordsworth
1850–92: longest time in office		Alfred Lord Tennyson
1896–1913		Alfred Austin
1913–30		Robert Bridges
1930–67		John Masefield
1968–72		Cecil Day Lewis
1972–84		John Betjeman
1984–98: the last (to date) to hold the office for life		Ted Hughes
1999–2009: accepted the role for only ten years, breaking the tradition of its being held for life		Andrew Motion
2009–19: the only female incumbent, to date		Carol Ann Duffy
2019–29		Simon Armitage

Refusals

The following poets turned down the post of Poet Laureate:

1757, following the death of Colley Cibber		Thomas Gray
1813, following the death of Henry James Pye		Walter Scott
1850, following the death of Wordsworth (he was 87 years old and died five years later)		Samuel Rogers
1892, following the death of Tennyson		William Morris
1984, following the death of Betjeman		Philip Larkin

The Nation's Favourites

In 1995 the BBC conducted a poll to find the UK's 100 favourite poems. Seems to me that any serious quizzer should be able to name the author of any one of these (although I can't say I could myself, before I made the effort to learn them); so here they are.

Please note: the dates are for guidance only. As far as possible they're when the poems were written, but they may be when they were published. Some are approximate.

1	If ("If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you")	1910		Rudyard Kipling
2	The Lady of Shalott	1833		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
3	The Listeners ("'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller / Knocking on the moonlit door")	1912		Walter de la Mare
4	Not Waving but Drowning	1957		Stevie Smith
5	The Daffodils (a.k.a. I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud)	1804		William Wordsworth
6	To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness")	1819		John Keats
7	The Lake Isle of Innisfree	1888		W. B. Yeats
8	Dulce et Decorum Est	1817		Wilfred Owen
9	Ode to a Nightingale	1819		John Keats
10	Aedh (ee or ay) Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven	1899		W. B. Yeats
11	Remember ("Remember me when I am gone away ... ")	1849		Christina Rossetti
12	Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	1750		Thomas Gray
13	Fern Hill ("Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs")	1945		Dylan Thomas
14	Leisure ("What is this life if full of care / We have no time to stand and stare")	1911		W. H. Davies
15	The Highwayman	1906		Alfred Noyes
16	To His Coy Mistress	1650		Andrew Marvel
17	Dover Beach	1851		Matthew Arnold
18	The Tyger ("Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night ")	1794		William Blake
19	Stop All the Clocks	1936		W. H. Auden
20	Adlestrop ("Yes. I remember Adlestrop ... ")	1914		Edward Thomas
21	The Soldier ("If I should die, think only this of me ... ")	1914		Rupert Brooke
22	Warning ("When I am an old woman I shall wear purple")	1961		Jenny Joseph
23	Sea–Fever	1902		John Masefield
24	Upon Westminster Bridge ("Earth has not anything to show more fair")	1802		William Wordsworth
25	Sonnets from the Portuguese XLIII ("How Do I Love Thee?")	1845		Elizabeth Barrett Browning
26	The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock	1910		T. S. Eliot
27	Cargoes	1903		John Masefield
28	Jabberwocky	1871		Lewis Carroll
29	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	1797		Samuel Taylor Coleridge
30	Ozymandias of Egypt	1818		Percy Bysshe Shelley
31	Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening	1922		Robert Frost
32	Abou Ben Adhem ("Abou Ben Adhem – may his tribe increase! / Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace")	1838		Leigh Hunt
33	Everyone Sang (about the end of World War I)	1919		Siegfried Sassoon
34	The Windhover	1918		Gerard Manley Hopkins
35	Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night	1951		Dylan Thomas
36	Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")	1609		William Shakespeare
37	When You Are Old	1893		W. B. Yeats
38	Naming of Parts – from Lessons of the War (to Alan Mitchell)	1942		Henry Reed
39	The Darkling Thrush	1899		Thomas Hardy
40	Please Mrs. Butler	1983		Allan Ahlberg
41	Kubla Khan	1797		Samuel Taylor Coleridge
42	Home–Thoughts, From Abroad ("Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there")	1845		Robert Browning
43	High Flight (An Airman's Ecstasy)	1941		John Gillespie Magee
44	Journey of the Magi	1927		T. S. Eliot
45	The Owl and the Pussy–Cat	1871		Edward Lear
46	The Glory of the Garden	1911		Rudyard Kipling
47	The Road Not Taken	1915		Robert Frost
48	The Way Through the Woods	1910		Rudyard Kipling
49	Anthem for Doomed Youth ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?")	1917		Wilfred Owen
50	Bloody Men ("Bloody men are like bloody buses ... ")	1987		Wendy Cope
51	Emmonsail's Heath in Winter	1828		John Clare
52	La Figlia Che Piange	1917		T. S. Eliot
53	The Whitsun Weddings	1964		Philip Larkin
54	The Ballad of Reading Gaol	1897		Oscar Wilde
55	I Remember, I Remember ("I remember, I remember / The house where I was born")	1844		Thomas Hood
56	This Be the Verse	1971		Philip Larkin
57	Snake	1923		D. H. Lawrence
58	The Great Lover	1914		Rupert Brooke
59	A Red, Red Rose	1794		Robert Burns
60	The Sunlight on the Garden	1936		Louis MacNeice
61	The Old Vicarage, Grantchester	1912		Rupert Brooke
62	Diary of a Church Mouse	1975		John Betjeman
63	Silver	1913		Walter de la Mare
64	Pied Beauty ("Glory be to God for dappled things")	1877		Gerard Manley Hopkins
65	Prayer Before Birth ("I am not yet born; O hear me ... ")	1944		Louis MacNeice
66	Macavity: The Mystery Cat	1939		T. S. Eliot
67	Afterwards	1917		Thomas Hardy
68	The Donkey (" ... The Devil's walking parody / on all four–footed things")	1927		G. K. Chesterton
69	My Last Duchess	1842		Robert Browning
70	Christmas ("The bells of waiting Advent ring ... ")	1954		John Betjeman
71	The Thought–Fox	1957		Ted Hughes
72	Preludes ("The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways")	1911		T. S. Eliot
73	Love (III) ("Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back / Guilty of dust and sin")	1633		George Herbert
74	The Charge of the Light Brigade	1854		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
75	I Am! ("I am: yet what I am none cares or knows")	1845		John Clare
76	The Hound of Heaven	1893		Francis Thompson
77	The Passionate Shepherd to his Love ("Come live with me and be my Love")	1599		Christopher Marlowe
78	The Song of Wandering Aengus ("I went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head")	1897		W. B. Yeats
79	She Walks in Beauty	1814		George Gordon, Lord Byron
80	Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now	1895		A. E. Housman
81	The Flea ("Marke but this flea, and marke in this ... ")	1595		John Donne
82	Ducks (" ... All God's jokes are good - even the practical ones!")	1919		F. W. Harvey
83	An Arundel Tomb ("Side by side, their faces blurred / The earl and countess lie in stone")	1956		Philip Larkin
84	Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments")	1609		William Shakespeare
85	Ulysses (last line: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield")	1833		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
86	Snow (last line: "There is more than glass between the snow and the roses") 1935	1935		Louis MacNeice
87	Let Me Die a Youngman's Death	1967		Roger McGough
88	The Ruined Maid	1866		Thomas Hardy
89	Toilet ("I wonder will I speak to the girl / Sitting opposite me on this train")			Hugo Williams
90	Futility ("Move him into the sun ... If anything might rouse him now / The kind onld sun will know")	1918		Wilfred Owen
91	The Raven ("Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'")	1845		Edgar Allan Poe
92	Tam o'Shanter	1790		Robert Burns
93	Love's Philosophy (ends: "What are all these kissings worth / If thou kiss not me?")	1819		Percy Bysshe Shelley
94	The Song of Hiawatha	1855		H. W. Longfellow
95	God's Grandeur ("The world is charges with the Grandeur of God")	1877		Gerard Manley Hopkins
96	Chocolate Cake (I love chocolate cake / And when I was a boy / I loved it even more")	1983		Michael Rosen
97	Jenny Kissed Me	1838		Leigh Hunt
98	Blackberry–Picking	1966		Seamus Heaney
99	The Prelude	1850		William Wordsworth
100	Warming Her Pearls	1987		Carol Ann Duffy

Others

Q: Who wrote the poem(s) ... ?		A:
On the Pulse of Morning (read by the poet at Bill Clinton's inauguration, 1993); Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women (collection, 1995 – including the title poem)		Maya Angelou
Night Mail (1936), In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1940), The Age of Anxiety (1948), The Shield of Achilles (1952)		W. H. Auden
Funeral Blues (1936–8 – read by John Hannah at the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral) – sometimes known by its first line, "Stop all the clocks"
I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth		Pam Ayres
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of evil – 1857, French poet)		Guy de Baudelaire
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, Cautionary Tales		Hilaire Belloc
Metroland; Joan Hunter Dunn (1915–2008) was a muse to		John Betjeman
Words to Jerusalem ("And did those feet ... "); Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell		William Blake
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Pauline, My Last Duchess; Home Thoughts, From Abroad; Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1852 – inspired by lines from King Lear)		Robert Browning
Paracelsus (a five–part epic poem based on the life of the eponymous Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German renaissance)
Holy Willie's Prayer, Auld Lang Syne, Address to a Haggis, To a Mouse		Robert Burns
Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage		Lord Byron
7th–century herdsman from Whitby, often said to have been the first English poet		Cædmon caedmon
Parlement of Foules – a.k.a. Parlement of Briddes (Parliament of Birds), Assemble of Foules (Assembly of Fowls), or Parliament of Fowls – containing one of the earliest references to the idea that St. Valentine's Day is a special day for lovers		Geoffrey Chaucer
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1829); The Village Minstrel (1821); The Shepherd's Calendar (1827); The Rural Muse (1835): collections by		John Clare
Gaberdine Angus, Beasley Street, Evidently Chickentown – all recorded on the 1980 album Snap, Crackle & Bop		John Cooper Clarke
Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956 – his first collection); The Flame (a collection published posthumously in 2018)		Leonard Cohen
Revolting Rhymes (1982) is a collection of six poems, each a parody of a popular fairy tale, by		Roald Dahl
The Divine Comedy (1300–21)		Dante Alighieri
Walking Away (1962 – in which a parent remembers a time, eighteen years ago during a game of football, when they realised that their child was growing independent)		Cecil Day–Lewis
Songs of Childhood: written under the pseudonym Walter Ramal, by		Walter de la Mare
Because I Could Not Stop for Death (published posthumously in 1886, the year of her death)		Emily Dickinson
"Gone with the wind" and "the days of wine and roses" are quotations from (English poet, 1867–1900; titles are Latin quotations from Horace and too hard for quizzes!)		Ernest Dowson
Regarded as the chief exponent of heroic tragedy; major works include the tragedy All for Love, the satire Absalom and Achitophel, the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and Annus Mirabilis (about 1666, the war with the Dutch and the Great Fire of London) – see above under Poets Laureate		John Dryden
The Waste Land; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Four Quartets; Ash Wednesday; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats		T. S. Eliot
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: translated into English by		Edward Fitzgerald
The Road Not Taken, Birches (in the 1916 collection Mountain Interval)		Robert Frost
The Bab Ballads (Fun magazine, 1861)		W. S. Gilbert
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)		Thomas Gray
Neutral Tones (1898), The Darkling Thrush (1901), The Ruined Maid (1901), The Respectable Burgher (1901), The Man he Killed (1902), A Trampwoman's Tragedy (1903), The Dynasts (a three–part "verse drama" – not intended to be staged – 1904–8), The Convergence of the Twain (1915), The Blinded Bird (1916)		Thomas Hardy
The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875–6, dedicated to five nuns who died in the wreck), The Windhover (1877, dedicated "to Christ our Lord") – both pub. 1918		Gerard Manley Hopkins
A Shropshire Lad (cycle of 63 poems, published 1896)		A. E. Housman
The Hawk in the Rain (1957) was the highly–acclaimed first collection published by		Ted Hughes
The Thought–Fox (included in the above) was the first poem written by
1998 collection The Birthday Letters won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize posthumously in 1999 (he died in October 1998)
Endymion; Ode to Autumn; Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode to a Nightingale; Lines on the Mermaid Tavern; Hyperion; On the Grasshopper and the Cricket; The Eve of St. Agnes		John Keats
Barrack Room Ballads – including Mandalay, Gunga Din; If; The Female of the Species		Rudyard Kipling
The Piers Plowman poems		William Langland
The North Ship (1945) was the first collection published by		Philip Larkin
The Whitsun Weddings, Church Going
The Mosquito, Bavarian Gentians, Innocent England		D. H. Lawrence
English writer, popularised the limerick in his Book of Nonsense (1846); wrote The Pobble who Had No Toes, The Dong with the Luminous Nose, The Owl and the Pussycat		Edward Lear
Jenny Kissed Me (1838), Abou Ben Adhem		(James Henry) Leigh Hunt
Hyperion (1839), Excelsior, The Village Blacksmith, The Wreck of the Hesperus (all 1841), Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Paul Revere's Ride (1860)		Henry W. Longfellow
Famous lamentation for the Tay Bridge railway disaster		William McGonagall
The Earth Compels, Plant and Phantom, Snow, Bagpipe Music, Autumn Journal		Louis MacNiece
Le Morte d'Arthur		Thomas Malory
To His Coy Mistress, Upon Appleton House, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, Flecknoe, The Character of Holland		Andrew Marvell
Salt–Water Poems and Ballads (1916) – including Sea–Fever and Cargoes, two of his best–known works – was the first collection published by		John Masefield
Reynard the Fox (1920) – a narrative poem
Modern Love (1862, collection), The Lark Ascending (1881)		George Meredith
Silly Verse for Kids (1959): including (possibly in a later edition?) On the Ning Nang Nong – voted in 2004 as Britain's favourite comic poem		Spike Milligan
Wrote about James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby George Dupree		A. A. Milne
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained; Comus (masque), Lycidas (elegy), Samson Agonistes (verse drama)		John Milton
'Twas the Night Before Christmas		Clement C. Moore
Admirals All, Drake's Drum, The Fighting Temeraire, Vitaï Lampada		Henry Newbolt
Author of the poem that inspired Elgar's Dream of Gerontius		Cardinal (John Henry) Newman
The Highwayman		Alfred Noyes
The Dead–Beat, Arms and the Boy, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est		Wilfred Owen
Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), Death and Taxes (1931) – collections		Dorothy Parker
Lady Lazarus, Blackberrying, Daddy; collections The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965)		Sylvia Plath
The Haunted Palace (1839); The Raven (1845: "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'")		Edgar Allan Poe
An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712), The Dunciad (three versions, 1728–43)		Alexander Pope
The Cantos – a sequence of poems incorporating mythology, history, politics, economics and autobiography – was the life's work of (US–born poet – left unfinished when he died in 1972 aged 87)		Ezra Pound
Buried manuscripts with his wife, then dug them up again		Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Ode to Joy – used in Beethoven's 9th (Choral) Symphony, and as the anthem of the European Union		Friedrich Schiller
The Lady of the Lake (1810)		Sir Walter Scott
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808 – a historical romance in verse of 16th–century Britain, concluding with the Battle of Flodden in 1513)
The Primrose and the Turtle		William Shakespeare
Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias, Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, The Triumph of Life (unfinished)		Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Masque of Anarchy (written in 1819 in response to the Peterloo Massacre, but only published posthumously in 1832); has been described as "the greatest political poem ever written in English" and "perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance"; often quoted to his audiences by Mahatma Gandhi
Façade (1923 – set to music by William Walton)		Edith Sitwell
Not Waving but Drowning		Stevie Smith
England fast bowler, also a published poet		John Snow
The Faerie Queene (1590–6 – an allegory on Elizabeth I)		Edmund Spenser
Bengali poet, Asia's first Nobel laureate (Literature, 1913)		Rabindranath Tagore
The Idylls of the King, The Lotus Eaters, Come Into the Garden Maud, Locksley Hall, The Lady of Shalott, In Memoriam – the last a requiem for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Fern Hill		Dylan Thomas
Deaths and Entrances (1946 – includes Fern Hill) was the first critically successful collection, and remains the best–known, by
Welsh nationalist poet, died 1994: wrote of the Severn Bridge, "Two lands at last connected / Across the waters wide / And all the tolls collected / On the English side"		Harri Webb
Oh Captain! My Captain! (1865 – a lament for Abraham Lincoln); Song of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric, I Hear America Singing		Walt Whitman
The Ballad of Reading Gaol		Oscar Wilde
The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna		Charles Wolfe
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798); I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, My Heart Leaps Up, Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3 1802 (all 1807)		William Wordsworth
The Second Coming; Easter 1916; The Lake Isle of Innisfree; A Prayer for my Daughter; Leda and the Swan; The Circus Animals' Desertion; The Tower (1928); The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933); Last Poems and Plays (1940)		W. B. Yeats

© Haydn Thompson 2017–24