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Power Up: Focus on American Poetry: Pretest

This is the diagnostic pretest for the Power Up: Focus on American Poetry, the first of NAQT’s line of Power Up study guides.

A printable version with answer blanks suitable for distribution to a group of players is available for download, as is the answer key.

1. The line “and miles to go before I sleep” is repeated at the end of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem by what author?
2. What “Fireside Poet” wrote the long work The Song of Hiawatha, inspired by Native American mythology?
3. Colonial poet Anne Bradstreet’s major collection is titled for what figure “lately sprung up in America”?
4. On what large work of art is Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” inscribed?
5. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen were members of what largely African-American literary and cultural movement of the early 20th century?
6. What long poem, which begins ”I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” was written by Allen Ginsberg, a member of the “Beat Generation”?
7. What female poet wrote the collection Ariel and the poem “Daddy”?
8. What poet praised the “City of the Big Shoulders” in his poem “Chicago”?
9. “April is the cruellest month” is the first line of what long poem by T. S. Eliot?
10. Emily Dickinson was known as the “Belle” of what Massachusetts town, where she spent most of her adult life as a recluse in her family home?
11. What poet described sounding his “barbaric yawp” in his poem “Song of Myself”?
12. What 19th-century American poet wrote “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl”?
13. What poet’s unusual punctuation and capitalization are on display in “anyone lived in a pretty how town”?
14. What man wrote of a creature that repeats the word “nevermore” in his poem “The Raven”?
15. The two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” was written by what Modernist and Imagist poet, who also wrote the Cantos?
16. Robert Lowell wrote a poem set in Boston titled for the “dead” of an army that fought what war?
17. Poet Joyce Kilmer wrote “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as” what natural object?
18. William Carlos Williams wrote that “so much depends upon” what object, which is “beside the white chickens”?
19. What 20th-century poet wrote the collection Harmonium, which contains “Sunday Morning” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream”?
20. What African-American poet from Chicago wrote the poem “We Real Cool”?