Collected Poems, 1909-1962 Test | Mid-Book Test - Hard

This set of Lesson Plans consists of approximately 149 pages of tests, essay questions, lessons, and other teaching materials.
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Collected Poems, 1909-1962 Test | Mid-Book Test - Hard

This set of Lesson Plans consists of approximately 149 pages of tests, essay questions, lessons, and other teaching materials.
Buy the Collected Poems, 1909-1962 Lesson Plans
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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. The speaker in "Portrait of a Lady" states that his auditor would have the "scene arrange itself" among the smoke and fog of an afternoon in what month?

2. By what in "Whispers of Immortality" was Webster much possessed?

3. What in "Morning at the Window" "hovers in the air" and "vanishes along the level of the roofs"?

4. Under what did the poem's speaker look for Mr. Apollinax's head to roll?

5. Who spreads a pink and white checkered cloth over a rusty table in "Hysteria"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of the lion made tame in the final stanza of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"?

2. What is the tone of the speaker towards his life in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", and how is this indicated in the poem?

3. What characterizes the speech of the stuffed men in "The Hollow Men"?

4. What is the meaning of the phrase in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" , "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"?

5. What does the reception of the viaticum in "Animula" do for the soul?

6. What is a possible interpretation of the last two lines of "Whispers of Immortality", "But our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm"?

7. What is the significance of the two stanzas concerned with Donne in "Whispers of Immortality"?

8. What is the tone of the speaker in "Morning at the Window" and why?

9. Who are the "ladies of the corridor" in "Sweeney Erect"?

10. How does the simple soul begin its life, according to the first 13 lines of "Animula"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

One of his most prominent poems, "Ash-Wednesday" describes the process of a man's conversion to a Catholic (albeit Anglo-Catholic) faith. Analyze the portrayal of a non-Catholic life against a Catholic life, as put forth in "Ash-Wednesday". What are the characteristics of a non-Catholic life? In what sort of action and substance does such a life consist? Alternatively, what is found in the Catholic life? What is unique to the Catholic life? What are the images Eliot uses to draw these distinctions? How are these images somewhat ambiguous, and wherein, and how, does one make them distinct individually and coherent as a whole?

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"?

(see the answer keys)

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