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

2. How many conditions that "often look alike / Yet differ completely" does the speaker discuss in Part III of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding"?

3. What object is the speaker of "Marina" considering when he states that the object is "less clear and clearer"?

4. Of what does the first coming remind "us" in "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"?

5. In Part III of "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton", it is said that "time-ridden faces" are distracted from their distractions by what?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

6. In the sixth chorus of 'The Rock,' why is it said that men must build with "the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other"?

7. 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"?

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

9. What is the significance of the final landscape, "Cape Ann"?

10. What is the "conscious art practiced with natural ease" of which Eliot writes in "To Walter de la Mare"?

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

Important to many of Eliot's poems are the devices of simile, metaphor, and analogy. Considering a wide selection of his poems, craft an analytical essay on these poetic devices. What are they? How do they aid in the creation of poetic imagery and poetic meaning? What are some specific instances of each? How do these specific instances aid the reader in both visualizing the poem's literal significance and its deeper meaning?

Essay Topic 3

The majority of T.S. Eliot's poetry is written in the deliberately unstructured form of free verse. Prior to Eliot, many poets considered this an inferior form, and in some cases, not a form at all. Evaluate Eliot's use of free verse in one or more of his poems, and judge whether or not it is truly poetic. What does free verse enable the poet to do that regularly structured meter does not? What effects does the free verse employed by Eliot produce? How does the free verse employed by Eliot produce effects? In the poem chosen, what particular effects does the free verse used produce? Why is this fitting for the poem's overall meaning? In what way is the poem truly or not truly poetic because of the free verse form?

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