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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. To what animal's path will the speaker of "A Song for Simeon" children's children take?

2. By whom is the speaker in the first stanza of "Gerontion" being read?

3. Who in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" "declines the gambit, shows fatigue"?

4. Of whose "damp souls" is the speaker of "Morning at the Window" aware?

5. The speaker in "Portrait of a Lady" states that his auditor would have the "scene arrange itself" among the smoke and fog of an afternoon in what month?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of the "guardians of the faith" keeping watch upon the shelves in "Cousin Nancy"?

2. How does the simple soul begin its life, according to the first 13 lines of "Animula"?

3. What is the significance of the intimacy between the footman and the second housemaid in "Aunt Helen"?

4. What sort of people are the "nightingales" among whom Sweeney cavorts in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales"?

5. What is the significance of the two stanzas concerned with Donne in "Whispers of Immortality"?

6. What happened to Phlebas the Phoenician, as described in Part IV of "The Waste Land"?

7. What characterizes the speech of the stuffed men in "The Hollow Men"?

8. What evidently characterizes the woman in "Hysteria"?

9. What is meant at the end of the "Journey of the Magi" by the magi saying that they found death when they encountered the Christ child?

10. What is a possible interpretation of the last two lines of "Whispers of Immortality", "But our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

One of his most prominent poems, "Ash-Wednesday" describes the process of a man's conversion to a Catholic (albeit Anglo-Catholic) faith. Analyze the portrayal of a non-Catholic life against a Catholic life, as put forth in "Ash-Wednesday". What are the characteristics of a non-Catholic life? In what sort of action and substance does such a life consist? Alternatively, what is found in the Catholic life? What is unique to the Catholic life? What are the images Eliot uses to draw these distinctions? How are these images somewhat ambiguous, and wherein, and how, does one make them distinct individually and coherent as a whole?

Essay Topic 2

Literature and philosophy have often been considered close and sometimes overlapping disciplines of academic study and Western culture. That T.S. Eliot was well versed in both is demonstrated in his last major poems, the "Four Quartets". Select one of the "Four Quartets" and in a carefully planned critical essay, examine the relationship between its literary structure and its philosophical considerations. What are the philosophical topics approached in the poem? In what way does the poem consider things in abstraction? In what way is the poem a literary structure (operate on the definition of literature as the imaginative creation of character and/or action, according to the laws of possibility and necessity)? How does the literary structure corroborate the philosophical consideration? Wherein does one find the literary significance of the poem? Wherein is the philosophical consideration found?

Essay Topic 3

The majority of T.S. Eliot's poetry is written in the deliberately unstructured form of free verse. Prior to Eliot, many poets considered this an inferior form, and in some cases, not a form at all. Evaluate Eliot's use of free verse in one or more of his poems, and judge whether or not it is truly poetic. What does free verse enable the poet to do that regularly structured meter does not? What effects does the free verse employed by Eliot produce? How does the free verse employed by Eliot produce effects? In the poem chosen, what particular effects does the free verse used produce? Why is this fitting for the poem's overall meaning? In what way is the poem truly or not truly poetic because of the free verse form?

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