1. Which of the following Romantic poets would have been most likely to write a poem celebrating the innocence of childhood ?
a. Lord Byron
b. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
c. William Wordsworth
d. William Blake
Correct Answer: d
2. Which of the following is a love poem ?
a. Byron’s “Don Juan”
b. Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn”
c. John Clare’s “To Elia”
d. Wordsworth “Peter Bell”
Correct Answer: c
3. Which long Romantic poem opens with the line “oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze” ?
a. “The Prelude”
b. “Don Juan”
c. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
d. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Correct Answer: a
4. “Ode to a Nightingale” focuses on ______________?
a. The futility of artistic creation
b. The unfortunate conclusion of the French Revolution
c. How pleasures are fleeting and life cannot continue forever
d. The fall of man into sin
Correct Answer: c
5. Which of the following would probably NOT occur in a William Wordsworth poem ?
a. Use of common, everyday language
b. Psychological insight
c. Mockery of political figures
d. Engagement with the natural world
Correct Answer: c
6. A neoclassical poet would be most likely to compose a poem celebrating which of the following ideals ?
a. Communion with the natural world
b. Emotional restraint
c. Passionate love
d. Revolution against tyranny
Correct Answer: b
7. Which Romantic author is the subject of Paul O’Brien’s essay “Prophet of the Revolution” ?
a. William Blake
b. William Wordsworth
c. Percy Shelley
d. Lord Byron
Correct Answer: c
8. Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” suggests that _________________?
a. Beauty can be understood only through metaphysics
b. Anything that is intellectual cannot be beautiful
c. Beauty is missing from the world
d. The source of beauty cannot be known, and that beauty can only be felt
Correct Answer: d
9. Who does Shelley consider the true founders of civilized cultures and laws ?
a. Kings and queens
b. Dictators and Tyrants
c. All people equally
d. Poets and artists
Correct Answer: d
10. Swift’s The Battle of the Books deals with the dispute between
a. Swift and arbhuthnot
b. Whigs and tories
c. Church and State
d. The Ancients and the Moderns
Correct Answer: d
11. A Tale of a Tub is a
a. Religious treaties
b. Political Satire
c. Children’s Book
d. Religious allegory
Correct Answer: d
12. Gulliver’s Travel is a
a. All Of these
b. Allegorical work
c. Children’s Book
d. Travel Book
Correct Answer: a
13. Which of these book is not written by Swift ?
a. Gulliver’s Travels
b. The Conduct of Allies
c. The Battle of the Books
d. Rape of the Lock
Correct Answer: d
14. Which of the following epithets does not apply to the Rape of the lock ?
a. Mock-Heroic
b. Comic epic in Prose
c. Heroi-Comical
d. Mock-Epic
Correct Answer: b
15. The Age of Pope is also called
a. The Restoration
b. Age of Sensibility
c. Classical Age
d. The Augustan Age
Correct Answer: d
16. “Pope Could fix in one coplet more sense than I Can do in six ” Who said this ?
a. Dryden
b. Dr. Jonson
c. Addison
d. Swift
Correct Answer: d
17. Pope’s An Essay on Man Is
a. A Poem
b. A Short Story
c. An Essay
d. None of these
Correct Answer: a
18. Who is the writer of The Beggar’s Opera
a. Defoe
b. Pope
c. John Gray
d. Thomas Gray
Correct Answer: c
19. What happened in 1707 that would forever alter the relationship between England, Wales, and Scotland?
a. The Toleration Act
b. The Bishops’ War
c. The Act of Union
d. The trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
Correct Answer: d
20. Which of the following was a major factor in the unprecedented economic wealth of Great Britain during the eighteenth century?
a. The creation of the bourgeois novel as a commodity
b. The American and French revolutions
c. Formal diplomatic relations with China
d. The union of England and Wales with Scotland
Correct Answer: d
21. What was “restored” in 1660?
a. The monarchy, in the person of Charles II
b. The “Book of Common Prayer”
c. Toleration of religious dissidents
d. The dominance of the Tory Party
Correct Answer: d
22. What literary work best captures a sense of the political turmoil, particularly regarding the issue of religion, just after the Restoration?
a. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera
b. Butler’s Hudibras
c. Fielding’s Jonathan Wild
d. Pope’s Dunciad
Correct Answer: d
23. Who was deposed from the English throne in the Glorious, or Bloodless, Revolution in 1688?
a. Elizabeth I
b. James II
c. George II
d. William and Mary
Correct Answer: d
24. Who became the first “prime minister” of Great Britain in the reign of George II?
a. John Churchill
b. Robert Harley
c. Henry St. John
d. Robert Walpole
Correct Answer: d
25. In the late seventeenth century, a “battle of the books” erupted between which two groups?
a. The Welsh and the Scots
b. Champions of ancient and modern learning
c. Abolitionists and enthusiasts for slavery
d. Round-earthers and flat-earthers
Correct Answer: b
26. Which of the following best describes the doctrine of empiricism?
a. All knowledge is derived from experience.
b. Human perceptions are constructed and reflect structures of political power.
c. The search for essential or ultimate principles of reality.
d. The sensory world is an illusion.
Correct Answer: a
27. Against which of the following principles did Jonathan Swift inveigh?
a. A, B, and C
b. Theoretical science
c. Metaphysics
d. Abstract logical deductions
Correct Answer: a
28. Whose great Dictionary, published in 1755, included more than 114,000 quotations?
a. Ben Jonson
b. Jonathan Swift
c. William Hogarth
d. Samuel Johnson
Correct Answer: d
29. According to Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for…:
a. Honor
b. Love
c. Money
d. His party
Correct Answer: c
30. What name is given to the English literary period that emulated the Rome of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid?
a. Augustan
b. Metaphysical
c. Romantic
d. Neo-Romantic
Correct Answer: a
31. Horace’s doctrine “ut pictura poesis” was interpreted to mean
a. Poetry is the supreme artistic form.
b. A picture is worth a thousand words.
c. Poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art.
d. Art should hold a mirror up to nature.
Correct Answer: c
32. What was most frequently considered a source of pleasure and an object of inquiry by Augustan poets?
a. Woman
b. Civilization
c. Nature
d. God
Correct Answer: c
33. Which of the following was probably not a stock phrase in eighteenth-century poetry?
a. Verdant mead
b. Checkered shade
c. Shining sword
d. Simian rivalry
Correct Answer: d
34. Which metrical form was Pope said to have brought to perfection?
a. The Ode
b. Free verse
c. Blank verse
d. The heroic couplet
Correct Answer: d
35. Which poet, critic and translator brought England a modern literature between 1660 and 1700?
a. Crabbe
b. Dryden
c. Addison
d. Bunyan
Correct Answer: b
36. Which of the following is not an example of Restoration comedy?
a. Behn’s The Rover
b. Wycherley’s The Country Wife
c. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
d. Wycherley’s The Country Wife
Correct Answer: c
37. Which work exposes the frivolity of fashionable London?
a. Richardson’s Clarissa
b. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
c. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
d. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
Correct Answer: d
38. What London locale, where many poor writers lived, became synonymous with hacks and scandal mongers?
a. Covent Garden
b. Grub Street
c. Cheapside
d. Elephant and Castle
Correct Answer: b
39. With its forbidden themes of incest, murder, necrophilia, atheism, and torments of sexual desire, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, created which literary genre?
a. The revenge tragedy
b. The comedy of manners
c. The epistolary novel
d. The Gothic romance
Correct Answer: d
40. Which of the following is not indebted to the Gothic genre?
a. William Beckford’s Vathek
b. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
c. Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian
d. Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Randsom
Correct Answer: d
41. While compiling what sort of book did Samuel Richardson conceive of the idea for his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded?
a. A book of model letters
b. A book of devotion
c. An instructional manual for manners
d. A history of everyday life
Correct Answer: a
42. Who was the ancient Gaelic warrior-bard considered by Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson to have been greater than Homer?
a. Decameron
b. Merlin
c. Ossian
d. Macpherson
Correct Answer: c
43. John Donne is, in some sense, the originator of metaphysical poetry. But who is most closely associated with the “founding” of neoclassical poetry?
a. William Wordsworth
b. Ben Jonson
c. George Herbert
d. Alexander Pope
Correct Answer: b
44. Which of the following is not generally considered to be a neoclassical poet?
a. Alexander Pope
b. John Dryden
c. Henry Vaughan
d. Ben Jonson
Correct Answer: c
45. Which of the following is not a common feature of neoclassical poetry?
a. An effort to represent human nature
b. Fantastic comparisons
c. Imitation of classical forms and allusion to mythology
d. Use of the rhymed couplet
Correct Answer: b
46. Most neoclassical poets viewed the world in terms of a strictly ordered hierarchy. What was this hierarchy called?
a. The Order of Angels
b. The Foundational Ladder
c. The Way of the World
d. The Great Chain of Being
Correct Answer: d
47. He wrote both religious and secular poetry. One of his poems urged virgins to make the most of their time.
a. John Dryden
b. Alexander Pope
c. Ben Jonson
d. Robert Herrick
Correct Answer: d
48. John Dryden wrote “Absalom and Achitophel.” Who was Achitophel, historically speaking?
a. Absalom’s advisor
b. A Judge of Israel
c. Bathsheba’s first husband
d. King David’s son
Correct Answer: a
49. Who did Dryden use Absalom to represent, allegorically, in his satire “Absalom and Achitophel”?
a. The Earl of Shaftesbury
b. Cromwell
c. Charles II
d. The Duke of Monmouth
Correct Answer: d
50. Complete this famous quote by John Dryden: “Who think too little, and who talk too ____”
a. Long
b. Often
c. Much
d. Fast
Correct Answer: c
