All Free English Literature MCQs with Answers

• A. D.G Rossetti
• B. Leigh Hunt
• C. Tennyson
• D. Arnold

Explanation: Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” based on the disastrous British cavalry charge during the Crimean War.

• A. The Legend of Good Women
• B. The House of Fame
• C. The Book of Duchess
• D. Troilus and Criseyde

Explanation: Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess to mourn Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt.

• A. Robert Browning
• B. D.G Rossetti
• C. Tennyson
• D. Christina Rossetti

Explanation: The Blessed Damozel is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a leading Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter.

• A. Arthur Hallam
• B. Milton
• C. Edward King
• D. Hugh Clough

Explanation: Arnold’s Thyrsis is an elegy for his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in 1861.

• A. the use of pictorial description to construct visual images to represent the emotion or situation of the poem
• B. sound as a means to express meaning
• C. perspective, as in the dramatic monologue
• D. all of the above

Explanation: Victorian poets experimented with visual imagery, sound patterns, and shifting perspectives such as the dramatic monologue.

• A. a narrative poem
• B. a sonnet
• C. an elegy
• D. a wedding hymn

Explanation: An epithalamion is a poem written to celebrate a marriage or wedding, and Spenser’s poem celebrates his own wedding.

• A. Hugh Clough
• B. Arthur Hallam
• C. Lord Byron
• D. Keats

Explanation: Tennyson wrote In Memoriam A.H.H. after the sudden death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in 1833.

• A. John Milton
• B. Charles Bacon
• C. John Donne
• D. Herbert Spencer

Explanation: John Donne is generally regarded as the foremost poet of the Jacobean age and the major English metaphysical poet.

• A. Iliad
• B. Odyssey
• C. Beowulf
• D. Canterbury Tales

Explanation: Beowulf, the major surviving Old English epic, contains the dragon fought by Beowulf in the final part of the poem.

• A. the neo-classical influence of Pope and Dryden
• B. the clumsiness of Shakespeare's plots
• C. the Orientalist fantasies of Coleridge
• D. Wordsworth's devotion to the ordinary and everyday

Explanation: Byron's references to 'Peddlers,' 'Boats,' and 'Wagons' mock Wordsworth's preference for humble subjects and ordinary rural life.

• A. the fractal
• B. the figment
• C. the fragment
• D. the aubade

Explanation: The fragment, an incomplete or deliberately unfinished poetic form, suited Romantic interest in imagination, mystery, and suggestiveness.

• A. Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake
• B. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
• C. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• D. Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt

Explanation: Lyrical Ballads was jointly published by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, a landmark collection in the emergence of…

• A. William Blake
• B. Alfred Lord Tennyson
• C. Samuel Johnson
• D. William Wordsworth

Explanation: Wordsworth made rustic people, social outsiders, and ordinary language central to poetry, especially in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

• A. the organization of a working class men's choral group in Southern England
• B. the Battle of Waterloo
• C. the Peterloo Massacre
• D. the storming of the Bastille

Explanation: The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when cavalry attacked a reform meeting in Manchester, inspired Shelley's political poems including England…

• A. the rhythmic expression of moral intuition
• B. the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
• C. the polite patter of a corrupted age
• D. the divine gift of grace

Explanation: In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in…

• A. troubadour
• B. skald
• C. chorister
• D. bard

Explanation: Romantic poets often looked back to the bard as the inspired poet-prophet who preserved a people's history and cultural memory.

• A. the lyric poem written in the first person
• B. the sonnet
• C. doggerel rhyme
• D. the political tract

Explanation: The lyric poem, often written in the first person, became the characteristic Romantic form because it centres on the poet's personal…

• A. John Clare
• B. John Keats
• C. Robert Burns
• D. A and C only

Explanation: John Clare and Robert Burns are both traditionally described as peasant poets because their poetry grew from rural life and working-class…

• A. The Rape of the Lock
• B. Solitude: An Ode
• C. The Dunciad
• D. Eloisa to Abelard

Explanation: These lines open Pope's *Eloisa to Abelard*, where Eloisa's secluded religious life is disturbed by memories of Abelard.

• A. often
• B. long
• C. much
• D. fast

Explanation: Dryden contrasts poor thinking with excessive speech in the line, “Who think too little, and who talk too much.” The balanced structure…