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Content of the GRE Literature in English Test

Each edition of the test contains approximately 230 questions on poetry, drama, biography, the essay, the short story, the novel, criticism, literary theory, and the history of the language; some questions are based on short works reprinted in their entirety, some are excerpts from longer works. The test draws on literature in English from the British Isles, the United States, and other countries. It also contains a few questions on major works, including the Bible, translated from other languages.

The test emphasizes authors, works, genres, and movements. The questions may be somewhat arbitrarily classified into two groups: factual and critical. (From GRE: Practicing to Take the Literature in English Test. 3rd ed. Published by Educational Testing Service. 7)

Sample Questions (from the same source):

Literary Analysis

Questions 1-4

His comb was redder than the fin coral,

And batailed, as it were a castel wal;

His bile was blak, and as the jeet it shoon;

Like asure were his legges, and his toon;

His nailes whitter than the lilye flowr,

And lik the burned gold was his colour.

1. The character being described by Chaucer is

(A) joly Absolon (B) Chanticleer (C) Reynard the Fox (D) hende Nicholas (E) Pertelote

2. Which of the following has two syllables when the lines are properly read aloud?

(A) "were" (line 2) (B) "bile" (line 3) (C) "jeet" (line 3) (D) "nailes" (line 5) (E) "flowr" (line 5)

3. In line 3, "bile" refers to his

(A) beak (B) liver (C) food (D) eye (E) brush

4. The n in "toon" (line 4) is

(A) part of the stem

(B) a remnant of the Old English Accusative

(D) a dative plural ending

(E) a sign of the strong declension

5. . . . as spices, the more they are beaten, the sweeter scent they send forth; or as the herb camomile, the more it is trodden down, the more it spreadeth abroad; so virtue and honesty, the more it is spited, the more it sprouteth and springeth.

This passage illustrates the style best labeled as

(A) Augustan (B) Petrarchan (C) Skeltonic (D) Swiftian (E) Euphuistic

6. Wherefore thinke on the doubtfull state of warres,

Where Mars hath sway, he keepes no certayne course.

Sometimes he lettes the weaker to prevaile,

Sometimes the stronger stoupes: hope, feare, and rage

With eylesse lott rules all, uncertayne good,

Most certaine harmes, be his assured happes.

Which of the following best summarizes the lines above?

(A) Men are inherently malevolent and therefore justly punished by the gods.

(B) The divine right of the ruler insures his eventual victory.

(D) In a hostile universe, human prowess insures military victory.

(E) In a world governed by chance, military victory does not necessarily come to those who deserve it.

Questions 7-11

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced

The rich, proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain (5)

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay, (10)

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

7. Which of the following lines conveys an idea similar to the idea in line 3?

(A) I all alone beweep my outcast state

(B) The fairest votary took up that fire

(D) Like as the waves make toard the pebbled shore

(E) And sable curls all silvered o'er with white

8. The subject of the main clause of the first sentence is

(A) "I" (line 1) (B) "brass" (line 4) (C) "soil" (line 7) (D) "Ruin" (line 11) (E) "Time" (line 12)

9. The argument of lines 1-12 is based on

(A) prejudice (B) testimony (C) probability (D) analogy (E) authority

10. A work showing a similar preoccupation with time is

(A) Marlowe's Hero and Leander

(B) Spenser's "Mutabilitie Canots"

(D) Jonson's "A Celebration of Charis"

(E) Herbert's "The Pulley"

11. Which of the following is the best summary of the last two lines?

(A) To weep is to be cowardly at the prospect of loss.

(B) To weep is to be ungrateful for the mercy of death.

(D) To love is to exist apart from the flux of experience.

(E) To love is to know that one must experience loss.

Questions 12-14

JONATHAN: My dear, I wish you would lie a little longer in bed this morning.

LAETITIA: Indeed I cannot; I am engaged to breakfast with Jack Strongbow.

JONATHAN: I don't know what Jack Strongbow doth so often at my house. I assure you I am uneasy at it; for, though I have no suspicion of your virtue, yet it may injure your reputation in the opinion of my neighbors.

LAETITIA: I don't trouble my head about my neighbors; and they shall no more tell me what company I am to keep than my husband shall.

12. The best synonym for "virtue," as Jonathan uses that word, is

(A) strength (B) chastity (C) goodness (D) temperance (E) fertility

13. The author chose the name Jack Strongbow because it suggests

(A) avarice (B) elegance (C) honesty (D) virility (E) poverty

14. The dialogue is characteristic of

(A) a medieval morality play

(B) a Restoration comedy

(D) an Elizabethan masque

(E) an early American monologue

15.

Ring out ye Crystall spheres

Once bless our human ears,

(If ye have power to touchg our senses so)

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the Base of Heav'n's deep Organ blow,

And with your ninefold harmony

Make up full consort to th' Angelic symphony.

In writing this stanza the poet assumes that his readers are familiar with the

(A) musical theories of Aristotle

(B) astronomical theories of Kepler

(D) aesthetics of Longinus

(E) cosmology of Ptolemy

Questions 16-19

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king--

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling, (5)

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field--

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; (10)

Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;

A Senate--Time's worst statute unrepealed--

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

16. The king of line 1 is

(A) William of Orange (B) George I (C) Edward VI (D) George III (E) George V

17. In the contest of line 3, "muddy spring" is a metaphor for

(A) the highly industrialized condition of England

(B) the ruling monarch's derangement

(D) the present ruling family's heritage and background

(E) the deplorably low level of public morality and behavior

18. In context, "Golden" (line 10) is best understood as

(A) equitable (B) beautiful (C) simple (D) valuable (E) materialistic

19. The poem consists of a single sentence whose main verb is

(A) "Makes" (line 9)

(B) "sealed" (line 11)

(D) "Are" (line 13)

(E) "Burst" (line 14)

Questions 20-22

An article as necessary to a lady in this poisition as her brougham or her

bouquet, is her companion. I have always admired the way in which the

tender creatures, who cannot exist without sympathy, hire an exceedingly

plain friend of their own sex from whom they are almost inseparable.

The sight of that inevitable woman in her faded gown seated behind her (5)

dear friend in the opera-box, or occupying the back seat of the barouches, is

always a wholesome and moral one to me, as jolly a reminder as that of the

Death's-head which figured in the repasts of Egyptian bon-vivants, a

strange sardonic memorial of Vanity Fair. What?--even battered, brazen,

beautiful, conscienceless, heartless Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her (10)

shame: even lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any fence which

any man in England will take, and who drives her greys in the Park, while

her mother keeps a huxter's stall in Bath still;--even those who are so

bold, one might fancy they could face anything, dare not face the world

without a female friend. They must have somebody to cling to, the affectionate (15)

creatures! And you will hardly see them in any public place without

a shabby companion in a dyed silk, sitting somewhere in the shade close

behind them.

20. In the context of the paragraph, the main function of such phrases as "tender creatures" (line 3) and "dear friend" (line 6) is to

(A) show the author's weakness for feminine charm

(B) expose ironically the physical ugliness of the women

(D) suggest the distance between appearance and reality

(E) suggest the esteem in which the companions are held

21. Which of the following best describes the tone of the narrator?

(A) Hearty and blustering

(B) Sympathetic and good-natured

(D) Impersonal and detached

(E) Insinuating and ironic

22. The passage suggests that ladies hire a companion in order to

(A) assist a fellow creature who is in financial straits

(B) set off their own beuaty and emphasize their feminine fragility

(D) make life easier for aging parents who can no longer act as chaperones

(E) share their lives with a worthy friend who can serve them as a moral example

23. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Moliere and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace. The extinguisher which Walpole dropped on Fielding descends on me in the form of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, a gentleman who robs and insults me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects.

In the passage above, Shaw is

(A) commenting on the effects of censorship

(B) discussing the pervasive influence of the Encyclopedists

(D) discussing the generic differences between drama and the novel

(E) acknowledging the superiority of a Continental literature to English literature

Questions 24-26

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most

poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by

manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of

the wood-cutter from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I

saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. (5)

Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.

But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon

which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the

poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-

deeds give no title. (10)

24. In the context of the paragraph, the wood-cutter's "stick of timber" is distinguished from the poet's "tree" in that the

(A) integrity of the tree is violated by the wood-cutter's axe

(B) "tree" is a useless object, whereas the "stick of timber" is useful

(D) poet sees objects in their organic unity, whereas the wood-cutter notices only their parts

(E) wood-cutter's occupation is to destroy nature, whereas the poet's obligation is to preserve it

25. Which of the following best describes the word "property" in line 7?

(A) It is a personification.

(B) It is part of a simile.

(D) It has a double meaning.

(E) It makes a Biblical allusion.

26. The passage above is from

(A) Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer

(B) Coleridge's Biographia Literaria

(D) Paine's Common Sense

(E) Emerson's Nature

Questions 27-29

Standing to America, bringing home

black gold, black ivory, black seed.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,

of his bones New England pews are made,

those are altar lights that were his eyes.

27. The poem from which the passage above is taken is about

(A) coal mining

(B) oil exploration

(D) the colonization of New England

(E) the homecoming of war veterans

28. The tone of lines 3-5 may best be described as one of

(A) jubilant exhortation

(B) optimistic nostalgia

(D) moral outrage

(E) amused sarcasm

29. Lines 3-5 are a reworking of a song in Shakespeare's

(A) Cymbeline

(B) The Tempest

(D) Twelfth Night

(E) As You Like It

30. I'm a wormy hermit in a country of prize pigs so corn-happy they can't see the slaughterhouse at the end of the track. I'm Jeremiah vision-bitten in the Land of Cockaigne.

What is the relationship between the two sentences?

(A) They are related as in a chronological sequence.

(B) The second sentence contradicts the first.

(D) The first sentence states a cause and the second an effect of that cause.

(E) The second sentence presents a detail supporting the generalization in the first.

31. Apollo gave oracular responses nine days a year, once each month except in winter (when Dionysus took over the oracle). The visitors had to be dealt with one by one, but the more important the inquirer the more likely it was that he would be seen early. Sophocles seems to have taken great care, in the account of the patricide, to preserve verisimilitude concerning the one-day-a-month responses. When Oedipus and Laius meet on the road between Thebes and Delphi, Oedipus has just received a response and Laius is probably on the way to place a request. Sophocles specifies a spot that is close enough to Delphi so that both men might have been dealt with on the same day. Laius, however, may well have been in some haste to arrive in time.

In the discussion above, the critic is attempting to

(A) provide stage directions for a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus

(B) provide information that will minimize the improbability of one element in the Oedipus story

(D) explain the effect of the events of Sophocles' Oedipus on the Greek audience

(E) explain the workings of hubris as both a motivational force and as an element in the denouement

Identification

Identify the author or the work. Base your decision on the content and style of each passage.

32. . . . two of his servants, the learned Poggius and a friend, ascended the Capitoline Hill, reposed themselves among the ruins of columns and temples, and viewed from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation. The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

(A) Defoe (B) Lyly (C) Spenser (D) Jonson (E) Gibbon

33. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

(A) "Among Shcool Children"

(B) "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

(D) "The Second Coming"

(E) "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"

34. A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother's wreck.

(A) Pound (B) Hart Crane (C) T. S. Eliot (D) Browning (E) Auden

35. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless that can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery, but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

(A) Nabokov's Lolita

(B) Roth's Goodbye, Columbus

(D) Pynchon's V.

(E) Waugh's Vile Bodies

36. Far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered. Someone had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern . . . it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impapable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shining and transitory window.

(A) Dostoevski (B) Colette (C) Mann (D) Zola (E) Proust

37. I profess . . . that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich.

This passage is from the concluding paragraph of a work by

(A) Bacon (B) Hazlitt (C) Dryden (D) Lamb (E) Swift

38. His verse, I confess, is not harmonious to us, but . . . they who lived with him and some time after him thought it musical. There is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. 'Tis true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine: but this opinion is not worth confuting; 'tis so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is a rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader, that equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in his age.

The passage above was written by

(A) Dryden about Chaucer

(B) Coleridge about Milton

(D) Arnold about Wordsworth

(E) Pope about Spenser

39. All fleeth save Good-Deeds, and that am I . . .

Fear not, I will speak for the . . .

Let us go and never come again.

The quotation above is from

(A) The Spanish Tragedy

(B) The Shoemaker's Holiday

(D) Volpone

(E) Tamburlaine

Questions 40-42 refer to the following excerpts from autobiographical narratives.

40. Which is by F. Scott Fitzgerald?

41. Which is by Flannery O'Connor?

42. Which is by Ezra Pound?

(A) When I read in memoirs about the Paris of the Steins, Sylvia Beach, Joyce, and Hemingway, I am ccast down. I was there. I may have passed them in the street; I had simply never heard of them. Nor had I any notion of what they were trying to do. I had really carried my isolation in England with me.

(B) I knew at 15 pretty much what I wanted to do. I believed that the "impulse" to write is with the gods, but that technique is a writer's own responsibility. I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than anyone living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell. In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages. I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every university regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with "requirements for degrees."

(C) I found myself in a millstream of gregariousness in New York and London: incessant contact with great theatre stars, with rich people and social people, at posh hotels, at parties, and on yachts. But through it all I never shook off the plaintive counterpoint of my parents, their religion and their poverty.

(D) In preparatory school and up to the middle of sophomore year in college, it worried me that I wasn't going and hadn't gone to Yale. Was I missing a great American secret? There was a gloss upon Yale that Princeton lacked; Princeton's flannels hadn't been pressed for a week, its hair always blew a little in the wind. Nothing was ever carried through at Princeton with the same perfection as the Yale Junior Prom or the elections to their senior societies.

(E) Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and

in the South the conception of the whole man is still, in the main, theological . . . I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered it is most certainly Christ-haunted . . . . Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows.

Factual Information

43. The heroine of this travesty of flowery romanticism eludes her blind and jealous husband by meeting her lover in a pear tree. No dreamy, swooning heroine, she is a quick-witted young woman perferctly able to turn to her own advantage even so unpromising a situation as her husband's regaining his sight at an extremely inconvenient moment.

The heroine described above appears in

(A) The Knight's Tale

(B) The Merchant's Tale

(D) The Clerk's Tale

(E) The Parson's Tale

44. The relationship between Richard II and Holinshed's Chronicles is most closely paralleled by the relationship between

(A) Bacon's and Montaigne's Essays

(B) Absalom and Achitophel and Aesop's Fables

(D) Donne's poems and Petrarch's sonnets

(E) Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained

45. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons and a court of owls. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beast of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.

The speaker of this prophecy is

(A) Shylock (B) Roland (C) Isaiah (D) Jesus (E) Beowulf

46. ________, childless, rich, feigns sick, despairs,

Offers his state to hopes of several heirs,

Lies languishing; his parasite receives

Presents of all, assures, deludes; then weaves

Other cross plots, which ope themselves, are told,

New tricks for safety are sought, they thrive; when bold

Each tempts the other again, and all are sold.

Which of the following correctly completes line 1?

(A) Volpone (B) Tamburlaine (C) Mosca (D) Malvolio (E) Coriolanus

47. He was a determinist, perhaps rather a fatalist, who depicted the strivings and passions of individuals as being in conflict with inexorable processes in the world. The heath, the village with its peasants, meant as much to him, perhaps, as the characters, many of them women, that he so convincingly created. He was a poet as well as a novelist.

The author described is

(A) George Meredith

(B) Charles Dickens

(D) D. H. Lawrence

(E) Anthony Trollope

Questions 48-49

The _____ myth is that the work of art is a spontaneous and partially unconscious crystallization of feelings too deep and intense to be released directly into action. It is a myth so powerful that it can, at moments, create a reality when there is none at hand. ________ and many others were condemned to live out in later years the literary roles they had created for themselves with their earliest works; they read these works into their lives.

48. Which of the following correctly completes the first sentence?

(A) Classical (B) Neoclassical (C) Romantic (D) Victorian (E) Metaphysical

49. Which of the following correctly begins the third sentence?

(A) Johnson, Gibbon, Voltaire

(B) Byron, Chateaubriand, Goethe

(D) Hobbes, Pope, Diderot

(E) Yeats, Chekhov, Sartre

50. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy ________, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in ________.

Which of the following correctly completes the sentence above?

(A) Prospero . . . Caliban

(B) Ahab . . . Moby Dick

(D) Ike McCaslin . . . the Bear

(E) Hepzibah Pyncheon . . . the House of the Seven Gables

51. Born in Africa, ________ acquired in an incredibly short time both the literary culture and religion of her New England owners. Her writings reflect little of her homeland and much of the age in which she lived.

Which of the following correctly completes the first sentence?

(A) Anne Bradstreet

(B) Anne Hutchinson

(D) Isak Dinesen

(E) Eudora Welty

52. In his writings, the concept of American individualism was pushed toward its limits. His views of government were somewhat anarchistic, and he insisted that if an injustice of government "is of such a nature that it requires injustice to another [you should] break the law, and let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."

The writer referred to is

(A) Jonathan Edwards

(B) Benjamin Franklin

(D) Henry David Thoreau

(E) Washington Irving

53. "Mosque," "Caves," and "Temple" are the titles of the principal parts of

(A) Voltaire's Candide

(B) Forster's A Passage to India

(D) Proust's Swann's Way

(E) Conrad's Heart of Darkness

54. It is a blasphemy-haunted but unblinking play in which the god Dionysus compels men to recognize his orgiastic presence within themselves--whether they wish to admit to anything so irrational or not.

The play referred to above is

(A) Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

(B) Sophocles' Antigone

(D) Aristophanes' Lysistrata

(E) Euripides' The Bacchae

55. Such varied practitioners of the Renaissance love sonnet as Wyatt, du Bellay, Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare found a common inspiration in the poems of

(A) Catullus (B) Dante (C) Petrarch (D) Tasso (E) Sappo

56. I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the ocmmon, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals.

The "I" of the passage above is

(A) Iago (B) Emma Bovary (C) Hedda Gabler (D) Captain Ahab (E) Raskolnikov

History and Theory of Literary Criticism

57. The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at [i] Alexandria, and the next at [i] Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more.

Which of the following accurately characterizes the passage above?

(A) It repudiates a strict use of the unities.

(B) It suggests that factual accuracy is crucial in historical plays.

(D) It asserts the desirability of giving English plays foreign settings.

(E) It rejects mixed genres.

58. "A confusion of actual meteorological conditions with the weather in the soul" is a playful definition of

(A) dramatic irony

(B) negative capability

(D) the deus ex machina

(E) the objective correlative

Questions 59-61 refer to the excerpts below.

59. Which is by Arnold?

60. Which is by Sidney?

61. Which is by Wilde?

(A) Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to nature--the [u] best [/u] nature--and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say we work for sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying that we work for Hellenism.

(B) It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness.

(C) Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done--neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.

(D) A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.

(E) Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gaslamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace, curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.

62. He attacked "the heresy of the didactic"--the prevalent stress on moralizing in literature--and defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty."

The author described above is

(A) John Dryden

(B) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(D) Alexander Pope

(E) William Wordsworth

63. There are others of the moderns who rival him in every other part of poetry; but in the greatness of his sentiments he triumphs over all the poets both modern and ancient, Homer only excepted. It is impossible for the imagination of man to distend itself with greater ideas, than those which he has laid together in his first, second and sixth books. The seventh, which describes the Creation of the World, is likewise wonderfully sublime, though not so apt to stir up emotion in the mind of the reader, nor consequently so perfect in the epic way of writing.

The passage above exemplifies the application of critical concepts set forth by

(A) Plato (B) Aristotle (C) Longinus (D) Horace (E) Cicero

Go to Departmental List of Recommended Works.

Go to Outline of English Literary History to 1750.

Return to Senior Seminar Syllabus.

Posted January 10, 1999