This week marks the one-year anniversary, more or less, of our trivial excercises. I thank you all for playing and invite you all to enjoy some imaginary champagne.
In keeping with a tradition of meaninglessness, there is nothing particularly special or seasonally appropriate about today's Quiz.
In Westminster Abbey's "Poet's Corner", three American writers are memorialized, though none of the three are buried there. Two of them died as British subjects -- one was buried in England, the other in America.
The third, also buried in the U.S., never became a British subject. Who is was it?
The first correct answer to comments wins an unopened pack of Budweiser playing card, featuring on the reverse of each card a representation of that extremely annoying computer-animated lizard that was, for some inexplicable reason, the center of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. As usual, stay thy cursor from the Google toolbar, retrieve not your Let's Go London from the shelf, and resist the temptation to phone Harold Bloom (such mere factoids are, I am sure, beneath his notice anyway). One guess per comment, but comment as many times as you like.
A follow-up bonus question: William Shakespeare wasn't memorialized in the Abbey until 124 years after his death. Another beloved English writer had to wait even longer, 145 years, before a plaque was put up in his memory. Whom does the plaque commemorate?
Poe and Marlowe.
Posted by: teenidol on February 28, 2003 10:40 AMEmily Dickinson.
Jonathan Swift.
Jack Reed
John Donne
I may be out of my depth here...
Posted by: Jonathan on February 28, 2003 11:03 AMNothing correct so far. I will add that neither is a particularly obscure poet; both are well-known names.
Posted by: BT on February 28, 2003 11:06 AMHenry Miller
T.S. Eliot
and an anniversary prediction!
Matt Groening isn't there now, but he will be by, oh, say March.
Eliot is memorialized in the Abbey, but he became a British subject prior to his death in 1965 (going so far as to refer to his politics as "royalist"), so he's not the one we're looking for.
As for Henry Miller -- the author of "Crazy Cock" in Westminster? You're confusing England with its neighbor across the Channel, methinks.
Posted by: BT on February 28, 2003 11:51 AMOK, hintsville. The American in question is one of those poets with whom all U.S. schoolchildren were once quite familiar, but who has fallen quite out of fashion in the past few decades. The "bonus" guy -- well, let's just say that despite the fact of his fame, his century-plus absence from the Abbey is somewhat understandable.
Posted by: BT on February 28, 2003 01:26 PMArgh, I've been there and seen these plaques and now I'm spacing.
Teddy Dreiser?
Posted by: Gavin on February 28, 2003 01:31 PMI don't recall his name, but he sure illuminated the human condition with his probing verse on the man from Nantucket.
I'm not good with poets and their home countries. I kick ass on the food quizes, though.
Posted by: Scott on February 28, 2003 01:41 PMRobert Frost?
Though I would guess he is still in fashion in the schools.
Posted by: Sara on February 28, 2003 02:21 PMA good guess with Frost -- but as you surmise, he's considerably more au courant in the educational system than the poet we're seeking.
Posted by: BT on February 28, 2003 02:24 PMEdwin Arlington Robinson?
Posted by: Soren deSelby on February 28, 2003 02:34 PMByron?
Posted by: on February 28, 2003 02:46 PMSorry, that was me with the anonymous Byron guess.
Posted by: Soren deSelby on February 28, 2003 02:47 PMI think I shall never see
A wombat quite this crazy.
Joyce Kilmer?
Posted by: bootsy on February 28, 2003 02:56 PMThe Sage of Santa Rosa hits it for the main answer, while our good friend Soren "Hatchjaw" DeSelby grabs the extra point.
While Edward Arlington Robinson of "Miniver Cheevy" fames was a good guess, he's a child of scorn as far as the Abbey is concerned. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he whose "Song of Hiawatha" has put many a twelve-year-old to sleep in class, spent a portion of his waning years living in England and basking in his literary fame there. He was commemorated in Poet's Corner shortly after his death. Longfellow, like Henry James, is buried in Cambridge, Mass; James is the third American in our little trio of bardic remembrance -- not everyone in Poet's Corner is a versifier.
Byron, probably the most popular poet in England for a good number of years in the early 19th century, lived far too 20th-century a life to be easily admitted into Westminster. Fittingly, it was in the orgiastic 1960s that the man who bragged about doing it in a hackney coach as a poetic prerequisite finally got a memorial in Poet's Corner.
I think that Joyce Kilmer is going to have to settle for that rest stop off of the Turnpike...
Posted by: BT on February 28, 2003 02:58 PMSo this means that Rochester is still waiting?
Posted by: Jonathan on February 28, 2003 03:04 PMI didn't know the answer but I would have bet that Hugh Grant played him at some point: http://us.imdb.com/Details?0093840
Posted by: teenidol on February 28, 2003 03:24 PM