“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot told us. It is also Poetry Month. Not that most poetry lovers need a special month to be reminded of the importance of verse. 
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with poetry ever since elementary school when I was supposed to memorize William Blake’s The Tiger:
TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
For some reason, I couldn’t get it.
Then, a series of very good teachers turned me around. In high school, one teacher introduced me to a poem that still sticks in my head, Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove.
Pretty hot stuff to a high school kid.
Poetry is one feature of my forthcoming book, Don’t Know Much About Literature –written in collaboration with my daughter, Jenny Davis and publishing on July 28. A collection of about 100 quick quizzes on everything from Beowulf to the Beats and Homer to Harry Potter, Don’t Know Much About Literature is meant to refresh some musty literary memories or introduce readers to some unfamiliar names and works. Most of all, it is meant to celebrate the love of words and writing.
So to honor Poetry Month, here is one quiz from the forthcoming Don’t Know Much About Literature:
“Let us go then, you and I.” With this opening line, T.S. Eliot invites his reader into the mind of his uninspired, indecisive narrator in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A poem’s first line can set a scene, as Walt Whitman’s “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed” does. Or it might intrigue the reader, as when Emily Dickinson writes, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” (Poem 465). Who opened their poems with the famous lines below? See how many poets you can identify.
1. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
2. anyone lived in a pretty how town
3. Take up the White Man’s burden–
4. ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
5. In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
6. It so happens I am sick of being a man.
7. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
Want the answers? Check back tomorrow!
