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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. To whom does the speaker say Cape Ann, the last Landscape, truly belongs?

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

3. In Part II of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding", the death of hope and despair is the death of what?

4. In "A Note on War Poetry," what two forces are "beyond control by experiment"?

5. What does the dullard in "Lines for an Old Man" know?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. What is the overall condition of true lovers described in "A Dedication to My Wife"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. 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?

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

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"?

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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