Poetry

The Uttarakhand Public Service Commission in Haridwar in India offers this amazing and entertaining  Poetry and Literature quiz.

Let’s try to solve it:

1. Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March had perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendered is the flour.”
Who wrote these lines ?
(a) Chaucer (b) Langland (c) Gower (d) None of these

2. In Anglo-Saxon Christian poems, Christ, Juliana, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles are
ascribed to
(a) Bede (b) Dunstan (c) Cynewulf (d) Junius

3. A group of 17th century English poets whose work is notable for ingenious use of
intellectual and theological concepts in surprising conceits, strange paradoxes and far
fetched imagery is known as
(a) The Soldier Poets (b) The Humanists
(c) The Metaphysical Poets (d) The Cavalier Poets

4. The first long narrative poem written by Chaucer is
(a) The Book of the Duchess (b) The House of Fame
(c) The Parliament of Foules (d) Troylus and Criseyde

5. The oldest of the Anglo-Saxon Biblical poems which dates from the beginning of the
eighth century is
(a) Daniel (b) Exodus
(c) Vulgate (d) The Dream of the Road

6. “Genesis” the longest poem based on Old Testament Story, contains nearly
(a) One thousand lines (b) Two thousand lines
(c) Four thousand lines (d) Three thousand lines

7. Choose the playwright who was killed in a brawl.
(a) Thomas Nash (b) Thomas Watson
(c) Christopher Marlowe (d) Edward Moore

8. Among the following works which one is not written by Ben Jonson ?
(a) Volpone or The Fox (b) Epicoene or The Silent Woman
(c) Pericles (d) The Alchemist

9. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus written by Mary Shelley is a
(a) Picaresque novel (b) Gothic tale
(c) Tragedy (d) Murder Mystery

10. What is the subtitle of Goldsmith’s semi-autobiographical poem, The Traveller ?
(a) A Song to David (b) The Citizen of the World
(c) A Prospect of Society (d) The Prince

11. Which of the following poems was completed by Tennyson in seventeen years ?
(a) The Lotus Eaters (b) In Memoriam
(c) The Princess (d) The Lady of Shalott

12. Identify the members of the Cockney School of Poetry.
(a) Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Wordsworth
(b) John Keats, P.B. Shelley, Lord Byron
(c) Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Wilfred Owen
(d) Leigh Hunt, John Keats

13. In which of Hardy’s novel does the character sorrow appear ?
(a) A Pair of Blue Eyes (b) Tess of the D’urbervilles
(c) Under the Greenwood Tree (d) Jude the Obscure

14. Which one out of the following is not a dystopian novel ?
(a) When the Sleeper Wakes (b) Nineteen Eighty Four
(c) Riddley Walker (d) Animal Farm

15. The first secular usage of the term “Epiphany” was done by
(a) Oscar Wilde (b) Shakespeare (c) James Joyce (d) Marlowe

16. “The pen is mightier than the sword.” This is an example of
(a) Apostrophe (b) Metathesis (c) Metonymy (d) Archaism

17. In which of the following texts does the character Madame Sosostris appear ?
(a) The Waste Land (b) Ulysses
(c) Dubliners (d) The Rainbow

18. Which one out of the following novels by Virginia Woolf was published posthumously ?
(a) To The Lighthouse (b) Between the Acts
(c) Orlando (d) The Years

19. The Grapes of Wrath is written by
(a) John Steinbeck (b) F. Scott Fitzgerald
(c) Gertrude Stein (d) Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. Who, out of the following literary artists, declared himself “a classicist in literature, an
Anglo-Catholic in religion and a royalist in politics” ?
(a) F.R. Leavis (b) James Joyce (c) William Empson (d) T.S. Eliot

21. Two prominent figures of post-structuralism are :
(a) Roland Barthes and Edward Said
(b) Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida
(c) Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure
(d) Ferdinand de Saussure and Freud

22. “Implied Reader” is a term introduced by
(a) Wolfgang Iser (b) Cleanth Brooks
(c) Ferdinand de Saussure (d) Roland Barthes

23. Which element, out of the following, is not essential for accurate pronunciation ?
(a) Stress (b) Fluency (c) Intonation (d) Semantics

24. The existence of conflicting discourses within any field of linguistic activity, such as a
national language, a novel, or a specific conversation is called
(a) heteroglossia (b) hermeneutics (c) denotation (d) circumlocution

25. Which critic out of the following has expressed the theory, that “the technique of analysis
each teacher will, for the most part, have to develop for himself”?
(a) Cleanth Brooks (b) T.S. Eliot
(c) I.A. Richards (d) F.R. Leavis

26. Milton’s first work is
(a) Paradise Lost (b) On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
(c) Samson Agonistes (d) Defensio

27. Poetry was composed in the East Midland dialect by
(a) Skelton (b) Stephen Hawes (c) Chaucer (d) Thomas Wyatt

28. In which century were the two parts of Cervantes’s Don Quixote published ?
(a) Fourteenth century (b) Early sixteenth century
(c) Seventeenth century (d) Early eighteenth century

29. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods;
They kill us for their sport” – Who uttered these lines ?
(a) Gloucester in Kign Lear (b) King Lear in King Lear
(c) Othello in Othello (d) Hamlet in Hamlet

30. Who wrote these lines and in which poem do these lines appear ? –
“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom.”
(a) W.B. Yeats in Leda and the Swan (b) T.S. Eliot in The Hollows Man
(c) T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (d) Rudyard Kipling in Recessional

31. “Poetry is simply the most delightful and perfect form of utterance that human words can
reach.” The above definition has been given by
(a) Francis Bacon (b) Edgar Allan Poe (c) Leigh Hunt (d) Matthew Arnold

32. In which year was the Tatler first issued ?
(a) 1611 (b) 1711 (c) 1609 (d) 1709

33. Who is Achitophel in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel ?
(a) Earl of Shaftesburg (b) Earl of Monmouth
(c) James (d) None of the above

34. A blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one type of
sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another is called
(a) Morpheme (b) Symbolist (c) Synaesthesia (d) Synchronic

35. “A kind of criticism that restricts itself to describing the critics’ own subjective response to
a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it” is called
(a) Legislative Criticism (b) Impressionistic Criticism
(c) Comparative Criticism (d) New Criticism

36. A kind of literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions or embodiments
of recurrent patterns or of timeless archetypes is known as
(a) Formalism (b) Expressionism (c) Myth Criticism (d) Dadaism

37. Match the following authors/poets from List ‘A’ to the titles of their works/poems in List ‘B’ :

A. Gower                         (i) Heroides
B. Robert Manning       (ii) The Romance of the Rose
C. Geoffrey Chaucer     (iii) Vox Clamantis
D. Ovid                           (iv) Handlyng Synne
A B C D
(a) iii iv ii i
(b) ii iii i iv
(c) ii iv iii i
(d) i iii ii iv

38. The story of Robinson Gusoe was inspired by the real life adventures of a sailor who spent
four years on a deserted island. Name the sailor.
(a) Juan Fernandez (b) Borneo
(c) Squire Lagoon (d) Alexander Selkirk

39. Charles Lamb characterises her manner as “innocence resembling boldness” and William
Hazlitt found in her “that forced and practised presence of mind”. Identify that character.
(a) Vittoria in The White Devil (b) Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi
(c) Miranda in The Tempest (d) Isabella in The White Devil

40. Paston Letters is the collection of the descriptions of the three generations of
(a) Edward family (b) Norfolk family
(c) Georges (d) Olivers

41. Which among the following is not a play by William Congreve ?
(a) The Double Dealer (b) The Mourning Bride
(c) The Way of the World (d) All for Love

42. The letters of which English poet have been described by T.S. Eliot as “certainly the most
notable and most important ever written by any English poet” ?
(a) P.B. Shelley (b) John Keats (c) Lord Byron (d) S.T. Coleridge

43. Arrange the following works in chronological order :
(i) Almayer’s Folly (ii) The Niger of Narcissus
(iii) An Outcast of the Islands (iv) Under Western Eye
(a) i, ii, iv, iii (b) i, iv, ii, iii (c) i, iii, ii, iv (d) i, iii, iv, ii

44. The Wind Among the Reeds is a collection of lyrics composed by
(a) William Wordsworth (b) T.S. Eliot
(c) W.B. Yeats (d) P.B. Shelley

45. Which of the following is not written by Anita Desai ?
(a) Fasting, Feasting (b) Games at Twilight
(c) The Inheritance of Loss (d) Diamond Dust

46. ‘Peripeteia’ is generally explained as
(a) a reversal of situation (b) the conclusion
(c) the conflict in the play (d) the change from ignorance to knowledge

47. Who considered Dryden “the father of English Criticism” ?
(a) William Hazlitt (b) Charles Lamb
(c) T.S. Eliot (d) Samuel Johnson

48. Anatomy of Criticism is a work by
(a) Northrop Frye (b) I.A. Richards
(c) George Saintsbury (d) Raymond Williams

49. For which book did Ruskin Bond get Sahitya Akademy Award ?
(a) A Handful of Nuts (b) Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra
(c) The Room on the Roof (d) Vagrants in the Valley

50. In which of the following works of Ruskin Bond Mariam Labadoor is found as a character ?
(a) When Darkness Falls (b) Strangers in the Night
(c) A Flight of Pigeons (d) Rain in the Mountains

51. “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night”
Who wrote these lines ?
(a) Blake (b) Hardy (c) Shakespeare (d) None of these

52. Which one out of the following is not a characteristic feature of Ruskin Bond’s short
stories ?
(a) They are children stories.
(b) His heroes have an openness of mind.
(c) They spring up from the Himalayan soil.
(d) They are totally objective in nature.

53. When was Irwin Allan Sealy’s first novel The Trotter Nama published ?
(a) 1990 (b) 1986 (c) 1988 (d) 1987

54. Which one out of the following is not found in the fiction of Ruskin Bond ?
(a) It appeals to eradicate the roots of evil and violence against man and animal.
(b) It wants to keep this earth beautiful and healthy.
(c) It interrelates liberty and dreams.
(d) It intellectualises nature.

55. Who out of the following Indian playwrights has started the theatre group play pen ?
(a) Badal Sircar (b) Mohan Rakesh (c) Vijay Tendulkar (d) Mahesh Dattani

56. Which one out of the following is the first novel of V.S. Naipaul ?
(a) A House for Mr. Biswas (b) The Mimic Men
(c) In a Free State (d) Mystic Masseur

57. Which of the following novels of R.K. Narayan has Nataraj as narrator ?
(a) The Financial Expert (b) The Bachelor of Arts
(c) The Man-eater of Malgudi (d) The Guide

58. Which of the following novels of Raja Rao has the description of the freedom struggle of
the 1930’s ?
(a) The Cat and Shakespeare (b) The Serpent and the Rope
(c) Kanthapura (d) None of the above

59. Which one out of the following is not written by Jim Corbett ?
(a) Man-Eaters of Kumaon (b) The Jungle Book
(c) Jungle Lore (d) My India

60. Which one out of the following poems is not written by Nissim Ezekiel ?
(a) Night of the Scorpion (b) A Time to Change
(c) The Professor (d) Ways of Belonging

61. Which of the following is not a language activity ?
(a) Listening (b) Learning (c) Reading (d) Writing

62. Who is the father of American lexicography ?
(a) Noah Webster (b) Merriam Webster
(c) Charles Random (d) Wifred Funk

63. Who is the lord of the flies in Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies ?
(a) The Pig (b) Satan (c) Beelzebub (d) Belial

64. Who wrote The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Intimacy (1998) ?
(a) Caryl Phillips (b) Buchi Emcheta (c) A.S. Byatt (d) Hanif Kureishi

65. Which poet out of the following wrote the lines :
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream ?
Feed is that music : do I wake or sleep ?”
(a) P.B. Shelley (b) Robert Browning
(c) William Wordsworth (d) John Keats

66. ‘The Touchstone method’ of literary criticism has been propounded by
(a) T.S. Eliot (b) Mathew Arnold (c) A.C. Bradley (d) Homi Bhabha

67. In which play of Shakespeare is there a tribute to Marlowe as the ‘dead shepherd’ ?
(a) Twelfth Night (b) Measure for Measure
(c) As You Like It (d) The Tempest

68. Who wrote the novel Waverley ?
(a) Maria Edgeworth (b) Mrs. Radcliff
(c) Walter Scott (d) Lawrence Sterne

69. Which chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria contains his famous distinction between
Fancy and Imagination ?
(a) Chapter I (b) Chapter X (c) Chapter XIII (d) Chapter XV

70. Charles Dickens was the first editor of a newspaper which started in 1846. Which was it ?
(a) The Morning Chronicle (b) Daily News
(c) Morning Post (d) Daily Chronicle

71. Which American critic applied the term ‘New Criticism’ in 1910 to a range of critical
methods that were developing in Europe ?
(a) Cleanth Brooks (b) T.S. Eliot
(c) William Empson (d) Joel Spingarn

72. Who wrote All About H. Hatterr (1948) ?
(a) M.G. Vassanji (b) G.V. Desani
(c) Shauna Singh Baldwin (d) Rohinton Mistry

73. “Its characters, instead of being taken from sacred narratives, or legends of the saints, were
personified abstractions.” Which dramatic form does this statement refer to?
(a) Miracle Play (b) Morality Play (c) Interlude (d) Romantic Comedy

74. Which of the following plays has not been written by Christopher Marlowe?
(a) Dr. Faustus (b) The Spanish Tragedy
(c) Edward II (d) The Jew of Malta

75. Which of the following novels has not been written by Thomas Hardy?
(a) Desperate Remedies (b) Under the Greenwood Tree
(c) Vanity Fair (d) A Pair of Blue Eyes

76. Who made the following comment on the first publication of Leaves of Grass – “The most
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed”?
(a) Robert Frost (b) R.W. Emerson
(c) H.D. Thoreau (d) Ernest Hemingway

77. Which play has been approved by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie?
(a) Gorboduc (b) The Spanish Tragedy
(c) Hamlet (d) Tamburlaine

78. Whose lines are these?
“What we call the beginning is often the end,
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
(a) W.B. Yeats (b) T.S. Eliot
(c) D.H. Lawrence (d) William Empson

79. “For art’s sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence.” Who made the
above statement ?
(a) John Gabworthy (b) G.B. Shaw
(c) Stephen Phillips (d) Oscar Wilde

80. Which of the following is the first novel by Tobias Smollett ?
(a) Roderick Random (b) Peregrine Pickle
(c) Ferdinand Count Fathom (d) Humphry Clinker

81. Who out of the following does not belong to “Scottish Chaucerians” ?
(a) Gavin Douglas (b) Cynewulf
(c) William Dunbar (d) Robert Henryson

82. Meaning of Meanings is a book by I.A. Richards and
(a) C.K. Ogden (b) J.C. Ransom
(c) William Empson (d) F.R. Leavis

83. Who launched the “Criterion” in 1922 ?
(a) T.S. Eliot (b) F.R. Leavis (c) Northrope Frye (d) J.C. Ransom

84. Which of the following is the first book printed in English by Caxton ?
(a) Beowulf
(b) Morte D. Arthur
(c) The Canterbury Tales
(d) The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye

85. Which of the following theories establishes the critic not as a mere interpreter of the text
but as a co-creator of the text ?
(a) Marxist Criticism (b) Structuralism
(c) Deconstruction (d) Post-colonial criticism

86. Match the following writers with their works :
(A) Nayantara Sahgal           (i) In Custody
(B) Anita Desai                      (ii) Mistaken Identity
(C) Upamanyu Chatterjee   (iii) Pleasure City
(D) Kamala Markandaya     (iv) The Last Burden
(A) (B) (C) (D)
(a) (i) (ii) (iv) (iii)
(b) (ii) (iii) (i) (iv)
(c) (iv) (iii) (ii) (i)
(d) (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

87. Match the Playwrights with their Plays :
(A) Pratap Sharma         (i) The Miracle Seed
(B) Asif Currimbhoy     (ii) A Touch of Brightness
(C) Mahasweta Devi    (iii) The Fire and The Rain
(D) Girish Karnad       (iv) Mother of 1084
(A) (B) (C) (D)
(a) (i) (iii) (ii) (iv)
(b) (ii) (i) (iv) (iii)
(c) (iii) (iv) (ii) (i)
(d) (ii) (iii) (iv) (i)

88. Match the following novels of E.M. Forster with their year of publication :
(A) A Passage to India                         (i) 1907
(B) The Longest Journey                    (ii) 1910
(C) Howard’s End                                (iii) 1905
(D) Where Angels Fear to Tread       (iv) 1924
(A) (B) (C) (D)
(a) (iv) (i) (ii) (iii)
(b) (i) (ii) (iv) (iii)
(c) (ii) (iii) (iv) (i)
(d) None of the above

89. Match the following critics with their works :
(A) Derrida                    (i) Of Grammatology
(B) Homi Bhabha         (ii) The Wretched of the Earth
(C) Frantz Fanon          (iii) Outside in the Teaching Machine
(D) Gayatri Spivak       (iv) Nation and Narration
(A) (B) (C) (D)
(a) (iii) (iv) (ii) (i)
(b) (iv) (iii) (ii) (i)
(c) (i) (iv) (ii) (iii)
(d) (ii) (iii) (iv) (i)

90. Match the following novels with the characters found in them :
(A) Nina Sibal’s Yatra                                       (i) Sarala
(B) Deshpande’s Small Remedies                 (ii) Mini
(C) Suma Josson’s Circumferences              (iii) Madhu
(D) Sunny Singh’s Nani’s Book of Suicide   (iv) Krishna
(A) (B) (C) (D)
(a) (iv) (iii) (ii) (i)
(b) (iv) (iii) (i) (ii)
(c) (iii) (iv) (ii) (i)
(d) (ii) (i) (iii) (iv)

91. It has been said that for the success or failure of a teaching programme, three factors are
mainly responsible. Which one out of the following is not included in them?
(a) Classroom (b) Men
(c) Material (d) Methods

92. Who wrote The Chess master and his Moves (1988)?
(a) Salman Rushdie (b) Anita Desai
(c) Rohinton Mistry (d) Raja Rao

Direction : Question Nos. 93 to 95 have sentences which are divided and marked (a) to (d).
The part containing the error has to be marked as your answer.
93.
If I would have
(a) /
been there
(b) /
I certainly would have
(c) /
taken care of the problem
(d)
.

94.
The principal of the
(a) /
college, together with some
(b) /
other teachers, are
(c) /
planning to organize an on-the-spot painting competition
(d)
.
95.
As there are only one taxi available
(a) /
I have no other alternative
(b) /
but to pay the fare
(c) /
demanded by the driver
(d)
.
96. “What but design of darkness of appall? If design govern in a thing so small.” In which
poem do these lines occoccur?
(a) “Design” (b) “Mending Wall”
(c) “Time to Change” (d) None of the above

97. “Creeds and schools in abeyance
Retiring back a while sufficed at what
they are, but never forgotten.”
In which poem do these lines occur ?
(a) “Dover Beach” (b) The Waste Land
(c) Song of Myself (d) None of these

98. “At the start of the winter came
the permanent rain and with the
rain cause the cholera. But it was
checked and in the end only seven
thousand died of it in the army.”
In which novel do these lines occur ?
(a) A Farewell to Arms (b) Torrents of Spring
(c) For Whom the Bell Tolls (d) None of these

99. Which of the following is not written by Tennesse Williams ?
(a) Fugitive Kind (b) A Streetcar Named Desire
(c) The Refugee (d) The Rose Tattoo

100. Dickinson’s poetry is not characterised by
(a) extensive use of dashes (b) idiosyncratic vocabulary
(c) unconventional capitalisation (d) robust nationalism
_____________

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