Identify the authors of the following quotes:

1. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”
2. “But O, as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back to my night.”
3. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”
4. “No longer mourn for me when I am dead…/ Lest the wise world should look into your moan, / And mock you with me after I am gone.”
5. “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
6. “In the middle of winter I learned, at last, that there is in me an invincible summer.”
7. “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten.”
8. “Parting is all we know of heaven / all we need of hell.”
9. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They never mean to, but they do.”
10. “The unexamined life is not worth living”
11. “Summer is late, my heart.”
12. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked…”


Answers:
Sylvia Plath [in anticipation of Ted Hughes]
John Milton [after a dream about his recently departed wife]
T.S. Eliot [and so begins the trend of poets in coffee shops ]
Dylan Thomas [wishing that his dying father had more spunk]
William Shakespeare [advising a lover to forget him]
Albert Camus [providing us with his special brand of grandiosity]
Edna St. Vincent Millay [on the virtues of going steady]
Emily Dickinson [on her two great losses]
Philip Larkin [speaking for most of us]
Socrates [well, yeah]
Stanley Kunitz [finally waking up at 85]
Alan Ginsberg [have a great day everyone!]


If you’re right on three you can regard yourself as literate, if six you’re a drone, ten or more you’re a cheater.

-Julie Lechevsky