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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. Where, in Part II of "Four Quartets: East Coker", have the houses all gone?

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

3. What is the name of the man who phones Doris in "Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama"?

4. What word is repeated at the end of "Difficulties of a Statesman"?

5. What is "more affectionate than hate" in "Lines for an Old Man"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is a possible interpretation of the significance of the "Midwinter spring" described in Part I of "Little Gidding"?

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

3. Why do the "cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries," spoken of in the first chorus from 'The Rock,' bring man further away from God and closer to dust?

4. About what is the speaker confused in "The wind sprang up at four o'clock"?

5. What characterizes the metaphors used as description of the old man bearing the "tooth of wit" in "Lines for an Old Man"?

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

7. How was the speaker awoken in "The wind sprang up at four o'clock"?

8. In the sixth chorus of 'The Rock,' why is it said that men must build with "the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other"?

9. What is implied about the owner of the eyes about whom the speaker is talking in "Eyes that last I saw in tears"?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Frequently appearing in T.S. Eliot's poetry, explicitly in the later poems such as "Animula", "Choruses from 'The Rock'", and the "Four Quartets", and implicitly by its total lack in the earlier poems, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men", is the theme of hope. Analyze the two ways in which this is a prominent topic for Eliot, drawing upon several poems as sources. What is the nature of hope? In what ways is hope lost or absent? What contributes to the loss of hope? Contrariwise, in what is hope to be found? How is hope to be had? What contributes to the possession of hope? What does hope do for human persons?

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

A persistent theme throughout Eliot's later poetry, from "Ash-Wednesday" onwards, is the power of faith in the decaying world, which is the theme of Eliot's earlier poetry. Provide your own critical analysis of this theme, drawing upon texts from several of Eliot's poems. What is the essential nature of the world around man as described in Eliot's poems? How does modernity contribute to this nature? What is there for man to find in the modern world? In contradistinction, what is found in faith? How does faith contradict the nature of the modern world? What is described as lacking in Eliot's early poems but found in a different way in his later poems?

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