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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. For what did Donne in "Whispers of Immortality" find no substitute?

2. Who is claimed as "our sentimental friend" in "Conversation Galante"?

3. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", it is said that the women "come and go, talking of" whom?

4. Under what did the poem's speaker look for Mr. Apollinax's head to roll?

5. What shall happen to those who praise the auditor of "A Song for Simeon"?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What is the tone of the speaker in "Morning at the Window" and why?

3. What is a possible interpretation of the "notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" described near the end of the "Preludes"?

4. Why is Sweeney uncomfortable in "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"?

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

6. How has Simeon passed his life, as described in "A Song for Simeon"?

7. What is the significance of the lion made tame in the final stanza of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"?

8. For what does Simeon hope in his encounter with the Christ child?

9. What does the reception of the viaticum in "Animula" do for the soul?

10. How does Mr. Apollinax contrast with his hosts?

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

Few poems, if any, have had as profound an impact on the world of poetry and literature as "The Waste Land", and yet its interpretation remains a subject of great dispute. In your own critical analysis, provide an interpretation of this complex and multi-layered poem. What is the significance of the major images and characters in the poem? What is meant by the often obscure and cryptic language? What is the relationship of the five parts to one another? What is the significance of the frequent inclusion of water as a symbolic figure in the poem? What is the overall, coherent signification of the poem?

Essay Topic 3

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?

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