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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. Whom does the poet shall "try" man's well-preserved complacency in the third of the "Five Finger Exercises"?

2. What is felt, in Part IV of "Four Quartets: East Coker", beneath the "bleeding hands"?

3. In Part II of "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton", it is said that what two things are reconciled among the stars?

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

5. What occurred in the past of the location of the fourth Landscape?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Where is the reader told to go and why in the third landscape, "Usk"?

3. What characterizes the tone of the poem in "Triumphal March"?

4. How is Part IV of "The Dry Salvages" different from the other four sections of the poem?

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

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

7. How do love and desire contrast with one another in "Burnt Norton"?

8. 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"?

9. What is the nature of the speakers "affliction" in "Eyes that last I saw in tears"?

10. What is the apparent distinction between the attitude towards Christmas of the child and the childish in "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

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 3

Though a persistent if implicit consideration in all of Eliot's poetry, and explicit in all of the "Four Quartets", "The Dry Salvages" speaks of the "intersection of the timeless with time." Analyze and explicate this abstract and metaphysical statement in the context of either "The Dry Salvages" alone or of all of the "Four Quartets". What does it mean to say that time and the timeless intersect? What happens at such a point? What is to be found in time? What is to be found in the timeless? Who discerns this point? What does this indicate about the nature of humanity? How is this notion contextualized in the "Four Quartets"?

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