“How to Kill a Poem Dead” - the answers
To read Allegra’s protest villanelle “How to Kill a Poem Dead,” click here. It contains 19 allusions to classic poems. How many can you spot?
KEY
Jargon, jargon everywhere: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
tiger burning: William Blake, “The Tyger”
etherized upon a table: T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
pleasure-dome: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
demi-paradise: Shakespeare, Richard II
Slithy toves: Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
dappled things: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
This naming of parts: Henry Reed, “Naming of Parts”
mince and quince: Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”
the rags of learning: John Donne, “The Sun Rising” (the rags of time)
Time’s winged chariot: Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
rusts unburnished: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
The body electric: Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
Bent double, knock-kneed: Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Nevermore: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
Rage, rage: Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”
Ignorant armies: Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
bee-loud glade: W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
Leaden-eyed despair: John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”