Study desk with books and learning tools for subject-based MCQ preparation

Focused topic practice

modern poetry and poetics MCQs

Practise focused modern poetry and poetics questions with marked answers for exam preparation and subject revision.

modern poetry and poetics Mcqs

1. Complete the following sentence. Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium is a good example of High Modernism, because it_____________?
0

A. attempts to create a modernist high culture.

B. was written at the very beginning of the 20th century.

C. embraces the rhythms and diction of common mans speech.

D. does not employ rhyme.

2. Professor Hammer points out that T.S. Eliot used quotation as an important literary technique. The use of quotations, according to Professor Hammer, suggests which of the following attitudes to the past ?
0

A. Curiosity about the past

B. Deference to the past

C. Violation of the past

D. Paradoxically both B and C

3. Professor Hammer argues that Hart Cranes poem Voyages is a complex reply to which of the following modernist works ?
0

A. T.S. Eliots The Waste Land

B. Ezra Pounds Cantos

C. Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers

D. T.S. Eliots A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

4. According to Langston Hughess essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (his answer to George Schuylers essay Negro Art Hokum), what is the mountain that stands in the way of any true Negro art in America ?
0

A. It is the racial discrimination endemic in the white community.

B. It is a widespread urge toward whiteness among African Americans.

C. It is a widespread urge to incorporate and neutralize other cultures among white Americans.

D. It is the racial segregation in the South.

5. The poem Dulce et Decorum Est ends with the following lines: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori. Which of the following statements best describes these lines ?
0

A. Brookes inclusion of a quotation from Horace in these lines serves to emphasize

B. distance between the ideals ofWestern civilization and its realities.

C. In these lines, Brooke seeks to bridge the gap between individual experience and cultural norms and beliefs.

D. These lines suggest the authors anger and disillusionment with cultural norms which glorify war.

E. All of the above

6. Which of the following statements best characterizes American World War II poems ?
0

A. They tend to use classical imagery while rejecting romantic tropes.

B. They tend to be narrative and confront the reader with stark wartime realities.

C. They tend to use traditional rhyme schemes and rhythms, and they avoid free verse.

D. They tend to use metaphors and avoid direct descriptive statements.

7. Which of the following phrases best describes the central goal of Imagist poets ?
0

A. Inclusion of natural objects as symbols

B. Emotional power achieved through suggestive visual images

C. Clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images

D. Exploration of philosophical paradoxes through visual images

8. In the first lecture of his Modern Poetry course, what argument does Professor Langdon Hammer make about the relationship between the modern city and poetic modernism ?
0

A. Many languages and many forms of language were used in large cities; modernist poets often treated language not as something given and natural but as a construct which they could manipulate.

B. All of these answers

C. Most modernist poets lived in large cities; therefore, they often used urban imagery in their poetry.

D. Individuals often felt lost and alienated in large cities, and among poets this resulted in turning inward and focusing only on the world of ones own imagination.

9. Which of the following poets wrote about World War II ?
0

A. Rupert Brooke

B. Hart Crane

C. Karl Shapiro

D. Rudyard Kipling

10. Ezra Pounds Canto I opens with the following lines: And then went down to the ship,/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and(). Which of the following statements best characterizes these lines and the poem as a whole ?
0

A. These lines are the only impersonal lines in the poem, the rest of which is primarily focused on the complexity of human emotions.

B. These lines set an impersonal tone which dominates the entire poem.

C. These lines establish a personal tone, focusing on a lyrical perspective similar to late-Victorian era poetry.

D. These lines establish a rhythmical pattern, which is followed strictly throughout the poem.

11. Complete the following sentence. Matthew Arnolds poem Dover Beach is illustrative of modernist poetry, because it________________?
0

A. is chauvinistic about British exceptionalism.

B. employs free verse.

C. was composed between WW I and WW II.

D. has an undertow of nihilism.

12. Which of the following statements best characterizes Langston Hughess poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers ?
0

A. Hughes uses a universal speaker for an exploration of a profound racial divide between blacks and whites.

B. The poem is an indictment of racial prejudice in Harlem.

C. The poem is an analytical exploration of racial differences in the United States.

D. Similar to Hart Crane and Whitman, Hughes uses a personal and universal I to address issues of history, race, and identity.

13. Which of the following features of Robert Brownings My Last Duchess make it classifiable as a Victorian poem ?
0

A. It has a regular rhyme scheme (aa/bb/cc/dd), which is sustained throughout the poem.

B. All of these answers

C. It is primarily a narrative poem.

D. It is concerned with conventional 19thcentury relations between a man and a woman.

14. Which of the following statements best characterizes the formal qualities of Langston Hughess poem Life is Fine ?
0

A. The diction is much more polysyllabic than monosyllabic.

B. This poem is structured like a villanelle.

C. The use of alternating end rhymes and word repetitions enhance the music of the poem and along with its occasional dissonance give it an improvisational jazz-like quality.

D. It is written in Standard American English for middle-class readers.

15. According to Professor Hammer, which of the following characteristics did Langston Hughes share with modernist poets like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost ?
0

A. Hughes was very conscious that he

B. an American poet, and this profoundly influenced his writing.

C. Hughes wrote about the legacy of the American Civil War and its long-term cultural consequences.

D. Hughes introduced new subject-matter and new language into poetry.

E. Both A and C

16. Professor Hammer argues that in a certain sense Wallace Stevenss poetry is always meta-poetry. What does this mean ?
0

A. Stevenss poetry always addresses several different audiences.

B. Stevenss poetry highlights an objective voice.

C. Stevenss poetry is primarily, though not explicitly, concerned with metaphysics.

D. Stevenss poetry investigates its own rules.

17. According to Professor Hammer, Wallace Stevenss understanding of the imagination has most in common with which of the following literary traditions ?
0

A. British Romanticism

B. Imagism

C. Vorticism

D. Classicism

18. Which of the following poets did NOTwrite about his experiences in World War II ?
0

A. Wilfred Owen

B. Keith Douglas

C. Randall Jarrell

D. Karl Shapiro

19. In his first lecture onWilliam Butler Yeats, Professor Hammer says that the young Yeats identified with King Goll. What does he mean by this ?
0

A. Yeatss poetry was autobiographical, but he understood his life through the prism of myths and symbols; symbolism was therefore present in both Yeatss life and in his poetry.

B. Yeats believed that each person was an instance of a general cultural type or symbol.

C. The young Yeats wished to emphasize his identity as an English poet and draw attention away from his Irish heritage.

D. Both A and B

20. Generally speaking, African-American themes were very rare in white modernist poetry. Which of the following white poets attempted to evoke elements of black experience in his or her poems ?
0

A. William Carlos Williams

B. H.D.

C. T.S. Eliot

D. Hart Crane

Previous Next

Showing 1 to 20 of 98 mcqs