View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Whose hands wove the "intolerable shirt of flame" in Part IV of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding"?

2. In the first chorus of 'The Rock,' what is said to soar in the summit of Heaven?

3. If the eyes spoken of in "Eyes that last I saw in tears" outlast the tears, in what will they hold the speaker?

4. In Part I of "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton", into what does the "door we never opened" lead?

5. The speaker of "Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages" wonders if whom meant that "the future is a faded song" in Part III?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the tone of the five parts of the "Five-Finger Exercises" and how is this indicated?

2. What is the significance of the final landscape, "Cape Ann"?

3. What does Sweeney primarily describe in the "Fragment of an Agon"?

4. What is a possible interpretation of the use of the phrase "In my beginning is my end" and its inversion, "In my end is my beginning" at the beginning and end of "East Coker"?

5. What does the speaker mean by saying that "Our only health is the disease" in Part IV of "East Coker"?

6. Why does the speaker of "Lines for an Old Man" compare himself with a tiger?

7. How is the "Mr. Eliot" of the "Five-Finger Exercises" satirized?

8. What is characteristic of the gods described in all of the sections aside from Part IV of "The Dry Salvages"?

9. What is implied by the repetition of the phrase "meaning / Death," in reference to the various stages of life's enjoyment in "Marina"?

10. For what is the ship in "Marina" a symbolic signifier?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Prominent in Eliot's poetry is the temporal, ephemeral nature of the physical world. Analyze this theme in a critical essay. What is time? How is the world temporal? What is the effect of the passing nature of the world upon the human person? What does this reveal about the human person? What does the human person's involvement with time reveal about the nature of time?

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

As T.S. Eliot's character of the "everyman," Sweeney appears in a number of poems and in one of the fragments of the unfinished poem, the "Sweeney Agonistes". Analyze the character of Sweeney as he appears in at least one of Eliot's works, giving an overall portrayal of the character through specific instances. What are his principal traits? What does he lack as a person? In what sort of actions does he engage? How is he representative of modern man? Who and what are used as contrasts to Sweeney as a person and Sweeney's patterns of behavior?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 911 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample