Poet's Corner: A Quiz Deck of Eloquent Excerpts: Knowledge Cards

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate: . . . The words are as familiar and full of comfort as a warm bath, but they have lost none of their power to thrill. You may well know that their source is Sonnet 18. But did you know that Shakespeare never meant for the general public to read them?

Each card in this deck of 48 offers an excerpt from the oeuvre of a great poet--Blake and Plath, Yeats and Millay, Dylan Thomas and Andrew Marvell are among the sources--on one side. The other side names the poem and the poet, with absorbing, insightful notes about his or her life and works. Deeply satisfying to the solitary reader, these cards can also form the basis of a brisk game of Q&A, as your friends wrack their brains to identify the authors of tantalizingly familiar-sounding stanzas.