This quiz from Wrong Hands is probably not meant to be hard – the answer key was printed rightside-up and not disguised. But even if meant mostly as a joke, we can get more fun from it, I think, by trying out our answers and seeing if there is anything to be found in the logic of it.
For a similar post in the past, we withheld the answer key and then posted it as a comment within the thread after enough answers had been posted. Here I think we can try the honor system: the answer key will be here, but obscured in a slider. You can leave it closed, then check after you comment; or skip commenting and just have a look after satisfying yourself that you know what it will be. (Slide up to see answers.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
Luckily I just wanted to see the answers, and didn’t feel any need to comment, that is until I discovered that the slider didn’t work on my browser anyway, so the answers are permanently visible.
My initial reaction: “I don’t like Yeats, Keats, or Twitter. So I don’t care.”
My second reaction: “Wait, Yeats rhymes with “waits”. They don’t even rhyme.”
I am unfamiliar with both Yeats and Keats, so this was impossible for me.
Carl, thank you for making explicit the pronunciation issue. The same point was reflected implicitly in the post title. I can’t feel sure whether Wrong Hands was simply unaware of how Yeats is pronounced, or was playing some odd double-reverse trick on readers where he (or other readers on his behalf) can say “Well he never said they’re all supposed to rhyme.
Personally, I don’t think any of them should rhyme: “Yates, Keets, and Twits“
Yeats and Keats are an eye-rhyme. I’m sure there is a more technical term but it is definitely an acceptable type of rhyme.
The slider also is not working on WP Reader.
However, I have tried to not look closely at the answer key, nor previous comments.
I feel sure A must be Yeats, not because I specifically recognize it, but because the same thought was expressed in his famous “The Second Coming”:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And I almost-recognize (F), inasmuch as I would have attributed it to “one of Byron, Sheets, and Kelley”. So from our available choices I would take Keats.
And then (B) and (E) seem pretty modern and non-poetic, so let’s match them to Twitter.
I knew which were Twitter. I recognized only one of the others and had no idea who said it (it was Keats). But mildly amusing, at least.
So, I think we can all agree that (B) and (E) are given away by their tone and content as the Tweets.
Then, although we wouldn’t expect to identify an author or occasion, for (B) in any case we can say what the topic was — the book Catcher in the Rye.
Can we do the same for (E)? Since this was in the comics, I’m tempted to say it was a comment on the “Cow Tools” comic from The Far Side. But the remark isn’t a perfect fit. Any other ideas?
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning the three pictures above the quotations are pretty decent caricatures of the three sources. I wasn’t sure if the Keats was based on some model or was a somewhat generic early-nineteenth-century gent. But a quick look at some portraits clarifies that it was specifically him in mind.
For instance
I figured out the tweets, but am not familiar enough with Yeats or Keats to get those. It seems like Yeats or Keats was the question on Final Jeopardy lately and that at least one person picked the wrong one, maybe that is where the idea for the cartoon came from.
It would have been better if the cartoonist had come up with some tweets that were plausible. It’s unclear whether these were real or made up.
I’m sure they’ve all been tweeted at some time or other.
B is in iambic hexameter. E is in iambic pentameter with a missing first syllable. Even Shakespeare sometimes leaves out the first syllable. In fact maybe it IS Shakespeare.
Polonius: How does my good Lord Hamlet? Know thou me?
Hamlet: I know you well, a fishmonger you are.
Polonius: Not I, my lord.
Hamlet: Oh look, I see some cows!
Polonius: Hast put an antic disposition on?
Hamlet: Some cows! They’re cows! Oh how I do love cows!
Polonius: Oh, yes, I know they’re cows. Stop saying cows.
I meant, of course, a tweet that isn’t just a quote from a poet.
But are the cows small, or are they far awy?