All Free English Literature MCQs with Answers

• A. Keats
• B. Shelley
• C. Jane Austine
• D. Charles Lamb

Explanation: “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” appears near the close of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The quotation expresses the poem’s…

• A. We Are Seven (Wordsworth)
• B. Ballad of Reading Goal (Oscar Wilde)
• C. Prisoner of Chillon (Byron)
• D. None of theseRead Classic Poetry

Explanation: These lines occur in Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, where the poem reflects on punishment, suffering, and the moral laws…

• A. Thomas gray
• B. Alexander Pope
• C. Edward gibbon
• D. William Blake

Explanation: Thomas Gray wrote “Hymn to Adversity,” a poem that reflects on hardship as a force that can cultivate moral strength.

• A. Robert Louis Stevenson
• B. William Shakespeare
• C. Samuel Johnson
• D. John Milton

Explanation: Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Requiem,” the poem beginning “Under the wide and starry sky,” which also serves as his epitaph.

• A. 14th
• B. 12th
• C. 10th
• D. 11th

Explanation: William Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman was written in the fourteenth century, probably in successive versions from the 1360s…

• A. It has a regular rhyme scheme (aa/bb/cc/dd...), which is sustained throughout the poem.
• B. It is primarily a narrative poem.
• C. It is concerned with conventional 19thcentury relations between a man and a woman.
• D. All of these answers

Explanation: The poem uses rhymed couplets, tells a story through the Duke's speech, and reflects Victorian concerns about gender, marriage and male…

• A. employs free verse.
• B. has an undertow of nihilism.
• C. is chauvinistic about British "exceptionalism."
• D. was composed between WW I and WW II.

Explanation: Dover Beach is Victorian rather than literally modernist, but its loss of religious certainty and bleak undertow anticipate modernist…

• A. The ideal of courtly love
• B. Elements of the Christian narrative of salvation
• C. The alchemical concept of the philosopher's stone
• D. The Renaissance concept of humanism

Explanation: The poem places the beauty and vitality of nature against Christian symbols and the biblical story of salvation.

• A. Patriotic imagery
• B. Irony
• C. Nihilism
• D. Apocalyptic imagery

Explanation: Fussell identifies irony as central to much Great War poetry because patriotic language and heroic expectations are set against the actual…

• A. These lines and the poem as a whole use both the political concept of a nation and the spiritual concept of eternity to give meaning to soldiers' deaths on the battlefield.
• B. These lines and the poem as a whole are primarily concerned with the extension of Britain's imperial power.
• C. These lines and the poem as a whole seek to directly express the horrors of war.
• D. These lines and the poem as a whole rely on assonance to magnify the critique of war expressed in the poem.

Explanation: Brooke links the political idea of England with the spiritual permanence of the dead soldier’s identity, turning a foreign battlefield…

• A. Yes, Lowell's detailed description of nature draws attention away from human realities.
• B. Yes, the lyrical voice in Lowell's poem seeks to express universal rather than individual experience.
• C. No, Lowell's poem is not impersonal; it addresses the maker of the bowl directly and speculates about his state of mind.
• D. No, even though Lowell strives for impersonal expression by borrowing poetic devices from Pound, she fails to accomplish this

Explanation: The poem is not impersonal because its speaker directly addresses the bowl’s maker and imagines his feelings and circumstances.

• A. Historic and contemporary imagery
• B. Kabalistic imagery
• C. Nationalist imagery
• D. Everyday imagery

Explanation: Zukofsky combines references reaching back into history with perceptions belonging to modern life, so the poem’s imagery operates across…

• A. Irony
• B. Allegory
• C. Oxymoron
• D. Alliteration

Explanation: The poem uses irony by exposing the contradiction between the Ku Klux Klan's claims of racial superiority and its brutal, cowardly…

• A. The devastation wrought by World War I was so enormous that it put Europe's cultural and political norms and values into question.
• B. The mechanized killing, which took place on a massive scale during World War I, made it necessary to reflect about the effects of technological progress.
• C. World War I was the first global conflict where the distinction between combatants and civilians was erased, and this had a devastating effect on the European psyche.
• D. Both A and B

Explanation: World War I challenged European cultural and political assumptions, while mechanized mass killing forced poets to confront the destructive…

• A. Love sonnets from the Nazi death camps
• B. American G.I. poetry from German prisoner of war camps
• C. Jewish dissident poetry from the gulags in Siberia
• D. Haiku poetry from the Japanese internment camps in the US

Explanation: Violet Cristoforo's anthology preserves haiku written by Japanese Americans in the U.S. internment camps during World War II.

• A. Is it possible for Romantic themes in poetry to be meaningful after the Holocaust?
• B. The horror of the Holocaust was inexpressible; how can poetry speak of what is inexpressible?
• C. Is there a relationship between poetry and rationality after the Holocaust?
• D. Is there a meaningful relationship between World War I poetry and World War II poetry?

Explanation: After the Holocaust, poets confronted the problem of representing an atrocity that seemed beyond ordinary language and artistic…

• A. These lines suggest that it was difficult to define patriotism during the Great War, but soldiers who died in battle provided the best example of patriotism.
• B. These lines suggest that the Great War lasted much longer than it should have.
• C. These lines equate humans with animals, and they anthropomorphize weapons to show a world where there is no place for human values.
• D. These lines represent a modern funeral dirge that mimics the rhythm of ancient Greek funeral dirges.

Explanation: The phrase “die as cattle” reduces soldiers to slaughtered animals, while “anger” and “stuttering” give human qualities to the guns and…

• A. They describe the author's experiences as a young child.
• B. They use metaphors with subtle political connotations.
• C. They ascribe colors and sounds to scents, relying on a device known as synesthesia.
• D. They describe a scene in the countryside, which symbolizes the state of the author's soul.

Explanation: Baudelaire's closing stanzas describe perfumes, colors, and sounds as answering or corresponding to one another.

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

Explanation: Identifying the young Yeats with King Goll means that he understood his personal identity through mythic and symbolic patterns.

• A. embraces the rhythms and diction of common man's speech.
• B. was written at the very beginning of the 20th century.
• C. attempts to create a modernist high culture.
• D. does not employ rhyme.

Explanation: High Modernism often seeks an elevated, difficult and culturally ambitious form rather than simply reproducing ordinary speech.