Tuesday Trivia

1. Which author’s wife died as a result of her dress catching on fire as she sealed their child’s hair in a scrapbook with hot wax?
2. Which author commissioned a portrait of himself as he expected to appear when he rose from the grave at the Apocalypse?
3. Which female author was also considered the world’s first computer programmer?
4. Believed to be an alcoholic and opium addict, which poet and author most likely died (prematurely) of a brain tumor?

Which author was so in love with his young bride that he visited her grave and opened her coffin nearly two months after her death?



Ralph Waldo Emerson was married to Ellen Tucker who tragically died just seventeen months into their marriage. According to a diary entry dated almost two months after her death, Emerson not only visited her grave site, but opened the coffin to be closer to his bride.




Which poet was sent to Russia to mediate with Nikita Khrushchev?



Robert Frost was sent to Russia as a mediator, but was so ill upon arrival that Krushchev had to come to him.




Which poet pleaded insanity to avoid criminal charges when police found that he was hiding a friend’s stolen goods in his college dorm room?



Allen Ginsberg ended up being committed to a psychiatric hospital because he did not want to face criminal charges.




Which poet compared love to a compass (the tool used to draw arcs and circles in geometry)?



John Donne, a lover of metaphors, refers to “stiff compasses” with fixed feet in his poem “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning.”




Which poet is buried at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey sans his heart (which resides with his wife’s body across town)?



Thomas Hardy wished to be buried alongside his first wife but also wanted to receive the honor of being buried at Poet’s Corner. A compromise was made and Hardy’s body was sent to Poets’ Corner while his heart was buried next to the grave of his wife.