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Name: _________________________ | Period: ___________________ |
This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. How many male voices speak in the third chorus of 'The Rock'?
2. In Part I of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding", it is said that the communication of the dead is tongued with what beyond the language of the living?
3. Whose carol and crown of fire does the speaker of "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" remember?
4. How many of the characters are women in the fragment of a prologue?
5. What is said in Part IV of "Four Quartets: East Coker" to be "our only food"?
Short Essay Questions
1. What is the overall condition of true lovers described in "A Dedication to My Wife"?
2. 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?
3. What is characteristic of the gods described in all of the sections aside from Part IV of "The Dry Salvages"?
4. How is the "Mr. Eliot" of the "Five-Finger Exercises" satirized?
5. How was the speaker awoken in "The wind sprang up at four o'clock"?
6. What is a possible interpretation of the significance of the "Midwinter spring" described in Part I of "Little Gidding"?
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 characterizes the tone of the poem in "Difficulties of a Statesman"?
10. What is meant in "Burnt Norton" by the phrase, "Only a flicker / Over the strained time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction"?
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
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?
Essay Topic 3
In the third part of "Four Quartets - Burnt Norton" is a line which reads, "Distracted from distraction by distraction." This line has often been quoted in reference to the condition of the modern world. Evaluate the meaning of this statement, within the context of both the particular section in which it is found, the poem in which it is a part, and the society which it describes, in a well-thought-out analytical essay. What are man's distractions? Why is he distracted from them? How is man distracted in modernity? What sort of things distract him? How is this idea fleshed out in the third part of "Burnt Norton"? How is it further fleshed out in the poem as a whole? What does this distracted condition indicate about human nature and the human condition in the modern world?
This section contains 1,020 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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