GRE Literature in English (REA) (45 page)

Which “I” is T. S. Eliot?

Which “I” is William Dean Howells?

1. I had fallen in love at first sight with the whole place—she herself was probably so used to it that she didn't know the impression it was capable of making on a stranger—and I had felt it really a case to risk something.
   
2. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics.
   
3. I would beseech the literary critics of our country to disabuse themselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to the progress of literature in the way critics have vainly imagined.
   
4. I can't help it, I'm crazy about thoroughbred horses. I've always been that way. When I was ten years old and saw I was going to be big and couldn't be a rider I was so sorry I nearly died.
   
5. But I liked to hear him talk—it made my work, when not interrupting it, less mechanical, less special.
   

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street ...

The description of the city is similar to one found in the writings of

1. Flaubert.
   
2. Dante.
   
3. Baudelaire.
   
4. Shakespeare.
   
5. Ovid.
   

The poet's reference to sighs is cited by him as derived from

1. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
   
2. Faustus
   .
   
3. Don Juan.
   
4. The Inferno.
   
5. Prometheus Unbound.
   

The author of the poem is

1. John Dos Passos.
   
2. Theodore Roethke.
   
3. T. S. Eliot.
   
4. Langston Hughes.
   
5. William Carlos Williams.
   

Vanity, saity the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews—sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well—
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!

The excerpt above is an example of

1. decalogue.
   
2. stream-of-consciousness.
   
3. discursive argument.
   
4. dramatic monologue.
   
5. expressive mode.
   

The first line is an allusion to

1. Shakespeare.
   
2. Thackeray's
   Vanity Fair.
   
3. Shelley's “Ozymandias.”
   
4. The Old Testament.
   
5. Pilgrim's Progress
   .
   

The poem was written by

1. Christina Rossetti.
   
2. Charles Swinburne.
   
3. Robert Browning.
   
4. Oscar Wilde.
   
5. Matthew Arnold.
   

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.

The speaker is arguing that

1. unconscious impulses destroy mankind's potential for greatness.
   
2. man can never be more than a beast who sleeps and feeds.
   
3. because of Original Sin, humans lost any potential to transcend their bestial natures.
   
4. God intended mankind to be more than mere beasts; our minds are proof of that.
   
5. money causes an obsession with physical gratification, causing people to ignore their higher mental faculties.
   

This speech was given by

1. Falstaff.
   
2. Caesar.
   
3. Hamlet.
   
4. Miranda.
   
5. Beatrice.
   

Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; and with thy bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale!—Light thickens; and the crow makes wing to rocky wood; good things of day begin to droop and drowse; whiles night's black agents to their prey do rouse.

The “prey” referred to in this passage are

1. night's hands.
   
2. the birds of night.
   
3. dreams.
   
4. daylight's fading rays.
   
5. living creatures.
   

The passage is taken from

1. Measure for Measure.
   
2. Cymbeline
   .
   
3. Henry V.
   
4. Macbeth
   .
   
5. King Lear
   .
   

BRUTUS

CASSIUS

BRUTUS

Brutus' sentiments are best paraphrased:

1. It is better to die young and brave than old and cowardly.
   
2. Only the old know that their death is certain.
   
3. A youth of twenty fears death more than an older man.
   
4. Cowards die many times before their deaths.
   
5. Death benefits those who have grown old in spirit.
   

For form is not a personal thing like style. It is impersonal like logic. And just as the school of ___________ was logical in its expressions, so it seems the school of Flaubert is, as it were, logical in its aesthetic form.

 

Which of the following correctly completes the quote?

1. Whitman
   
2. Mallory
   
3. Pope
   
4. Chaucer
   
5. T. S. Eliot
   

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small

 

Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see

 

Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

The first eight lines are similar in rhyme scheme to

1. the Shakespearean sonnet.
   
2. the Spenserian sonnet.
   
3. the Dantean sonnet.
   
4. the Petrarchan sonnet.
   
5. the Rossettian sonnet.
   

“Less than two / But more than one as yet” (lines 7 and 8) refers to

1. the lovers' shadows in the dust.
   
2. the tracing of the parasol in the dust.
   
3. the time before the lovers' relationship broke apart.
   
4. the time before the two lovers had fully committed themselves to each other.
   
5. the time before they met.
   

This poem was written by

1. Vachel Lindsay.
   
2. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
   
3. Robert Frost.
   
4. Lord Byron.
   
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
   

MOTHER

CHRIS

MOTHER

CHRIS

In the above exchange, Chris is

1. concerned with providing information.
   
2. concerned with ridiculing his mother's false beliefs.
   
3. using humor to bring his mother back to reality.
   
4. arguing for greater freedom for himself at home.
   
5. defending Larry's recent excuses for not returning.
   

This excerpt is from

1. Tea and Sympathy
   .
   
2. The Rose Tattoo.
   
3. Incident at Vichy.
   
4. All My Sons.
   
5. The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
   

A lovere and a lusty bacheler,
With lokkes crulle ans they were laid in presse.
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.

 

The character described above is

1. the Franklin.
   
2. the Yeoman.
   
3. the Squire.
   
4. the Knight.
   
5. the Monk.
   

Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high,
Or roll the planets through the boundless sky.
Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light
Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,
Or suck the mists in grosser air below,
Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,
Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,
Or o'er the glebe distill the kindly rain.

“Some” in the first line refers to

1. human professions.
   
2. the pantheon of gods.
   
3. the tasks assigned to the spheres.
   
4. the links in the Great Chain of Being.
   
5. nature's cycles.
   

The poet here uses the technique of

1. discourse.
   
2. specification.
   
3. cataloguing.
   
4. extrapolation.
   
5. extirpation.
   

“Glebe” in the last line can best be interpreted as meaning

1. faces of the people.
   
2. mountain crags.
   
3. desert sands.
   
4. cultivated fields.
   
5. oceans' beaches.
   

This excerpt is from

1. Congreve's
   Love for Love.
   
2. Bacon's
   Novum Organum.
   
3. Pope's “The Rape of the Lock.”
   
4. Lovelace's “To Althea from Prison.”
   
5. Milton's
   Paradise Lost.
   

The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in punctuation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers.

The “first character” that the author notes is

1. the tendency of American English to develop into different dialects.
   
2. the tendency for different American dialects to coalesce into one.
   
3. the general uniformity of American English throughout the country.
   
4. the tendency of immigrants to alter American pronunciation.
   
5. the general inability of scholars to identify Standard American English.
   

The author implies that

1. immigrants are a threat to the linguistic integrity of American English.
   
2. immigrants have no influence on the general accent.
   
3. immigrants have a minor influence on linguistic aspects.
   
4. immigrants have traditionally altered American speech.
   
5. only in spoken English do immigrants have an influence.
   

This passage was written by

1. H. L. Mencken.
   
2. J. C. Furnas.
   
3. T. S. Eliot.
   
4. James Michener.
   
5. William Safire.
   

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow—attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of

This opening paragraph suggests that the “history” the author is about to relate will be a

1. parable.
   
2. biblical allusion.
   
3. philosophical fable.
   
4. paradoxical
   roman a clef.
   
5. totological summary.