Poets on Poets Quiz - The Answers

1. ──! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England has need of thee 
From Milton by Wordsworth

2. But for him it is his last afternoon as himself, / An afternoon of nurses and rumours; 
From In Memory of WB Yeats by Auden

3. To the Shoulder o’ Mutton where ── ── brooded long / On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song. 
From All Day it has Rained… by Alun Lewis (writing about Edward Thomas)

4. ‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’ / The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work / That points at him amazed. 
From Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes (writing about Frieda Hughes)

5. I saw you, ── ──, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and enjoying the grocery boys. 
From A Supermarket in California by Ginsberg (writing about Walt Whitman)

6. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, / The flying cloud, the frosty light: / The year is dying in the night; / Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 
From In Memoriam by Tennyson (writing about Arthur Henry Hallam)

7. I have been writing your memoir. / It is like leaving the world / and still finding you there / as you received us, shaped us / and instantly became unrepeatable. 
From Letter to a Kiss That Died for Us by Tess Gallagher (writing about Raymond Carver)

8. So I could plainly hear her inhale / when I undid the very top / hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
From Taking Off Emily Dickenson’s Clothes by Billy Collins

9. I think I am in love with - - ──, / which puts me in a worse-than-usual fix. / No woman ever stood a chance with ── / And he’s been dead since 1936.
From Another Unfortunate Choice by Wendy Cope (writing about A E Housman)

10. Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, / come like a daytime comet / with a long unnebulous train of words, / from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. 
From Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore by Elizabeth Bishop

11. And most of us succeed, thank God, / So if, to coin a phrase, / You’re fucked up, don’t blame your mum and dad / (Despite what ── says). 
From This Be Another Verse by Roger McGough (writing about Larkin)

12. ── ── at midnight, the audience gone / to vapour, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs, / his voice is musical and raw – he writes in the flyleaf: ‘For Robert from Robert, his friend in the art.’ 
From Robert Frost by Robert Lowell

13. Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely. / Noted your long hair, loose waves / Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid. 
From Fulbright Scholars by Ted Hughes (writing about Sylvia Plath)

14. …and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way / I’d offer ── some kumquats and I’d say: / You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart: / say where the sweetness or the sourness start. 
From A Kumquat for John Keats by Tony Harrison

15. But the reel of them on frozen Windermere / As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve / And left it scored. 
From Wordsworth’s Skates by Seamus Heaney

16. No one remembers you at all. / Even that shower of Cockney shrimps, / Whose fathers hoisted them to glimpse / Your corpse’s progress down Whitehall. 
From In Memoriam of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Mick Imlah

17. O O O O that ── Rag - / It’s so elegant / So intelligent 
From The Waste Land by TS Eliot (writing about Shakespeare - the missing word is Shakespeherian)

18. We loved and feared your eager solitude, / The city as a man-made absolute, / A sunset grid of immanent desire. 
From Thom Gunn by Sean O’Brien 

19. This year no one will ask you how you voted, / or if you know the way to town // No one will call you as an eye-witness / or teach you how to train a bird of prey
From Missing You by Penelope Shuttle (writing about Peter Redgrove)

20. Till I heard ── speak out loud and bold: / Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken;
From On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats (writing about George Chapman - although we will accept Homer)