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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. With what did the old master met in Part II of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding" leave the poem's speaker?

2. Which of the following have not "become unsubstantial" in "Marina"?

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

4. What sort bird calls through the fog at the end of "Marina"?

5. What is the reader implored not to hope to find behind the white well in the third Landscape?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Why should the innocent approach of the child to Christmas not be lost, according to "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"?

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

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

5. What is meant in "Burnt Norton" by the phrase, "Only a flicker / Over the strained time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction"?

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

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

8. What does it mean to be "redeemed from fire by fire" as stated in the fourth part of "Little Gidding"?

9. What are the women doing with the card game in the "Fragment of a Prologue"?

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

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

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?

Essay Topic 3

Much of Eliot's poetry, particularly in the periods between 1925-1930, is considered to be related to the process of man's conversion from atheism to Christianity. Using several of Eliot's poems from this six year period, discuss the nature of this process in an analytical essay of careful consideration. What is a conversion? What sorts of things influence a man's conversion? How are these things described in Eliot's poems? What do such influential things offer that the rest of the world cannot? Why is such a conversion nonetheless difficult to make?

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