On the anniversary of his birth in 1809, a quick quiz in honor Edgar Allen Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote some of the darkest, strangest poems and stories in the English language. His narrators, who generally speak in the first person, have led many readers to confuse Poe with his deeply disturbed characters: opium users, sufferers of paranoia and delusions, sinister murderers. Aspects of the author’s strange life and death add to that confusion. In October, 1849, Dr. J.E. Snodgrass, a friend of Poe’s, was summoned to a Baltimore tavern where he found Poe half-conscious and dressed in someone else’s clothes. Speculation on the cause of his death has ranged from delirium tremens to injuries sustained during a beating to rabies. Think you know Poe? Take this quiz, and you shouldn’t need to “ponder weak and weary.”
1. How old was Edgar Allen Poe’s cousin, Virginia Clemm, when the author married her in 1836?
2. In which of Poe’s stories does the narrator hear “a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”?
3. In which story does Montresor kill Fortunado by immurement—walling him in and leaving him to die?
4. What is the name of Poe’s brilliant and extremely rational detective, who appears in “The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”?
5. The first Halloween special of the cartoon The Simpsons featured a segment based on Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.” Instead of “Nevermore,” what phrase did the raven (a Bart Simpson look-alike) repeat incessantly?
Here are links to the Edgar Allen Poe house and the Poe Museum
Quiz excerpted from
Coming in July 2009!
Answers
1. Thirteen. He was twenty-seven. After her death eleven years later, he addressed the poem “Annabel Lee” to her.
2. “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
3. “The Cask of Amontillado.”
4. C. Auguste Dupin.
5. “Eat My Shorts.” Although Poe died in 1849, he was credited as a writer for this 1990 television show.
