GRE Literature in English (REA) (33 page)

The author of this passage is

1. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
   
2. Mary Wollstonecraft.
   
3. Mary Shelley.
   
4. Kate Chopin.
   
5. Virginia Woolf.
   

... but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

1. Plato
   
2. Aristotle
   
3. Horace
   
4. Quintilian
   
5. Boethius
   

The best means would be, my friend, to gain, first of all, clear knowledge and appreciation of the true sublime. The enterprise is, however, an arduous one. For the judgment of style is the last and crowning fruit of long experience. None the less, if I must speak in the way of precept, it is not impossible perhaps to acquire discrimination in these matters by attention to some such hints as those which follow.

1. Quintilian
   
2. Longinus
   
3. Demetrius
   
4. Cicero
   
5. Dionysius of Halicarnassus
   

We may divide characters into flat and _______.

 

Complete the critic's description of character:

1. profound
   
2. deep
   
3. square
   
4. round
   
5. stretched
   

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon the room decked and furnished as for a bridal.

 

The room is

1. Miss Emily's in A
   Rose for Emily.
   
2. Miss Haversham's in
   Great Expectations.
   
3. Isabel's in A
   Portrait of a Lady.
   
4. Mrs. Mallard's in
   The Story of an
   Hour.
   
5. Bertha Rochester's in
   Jane Eyre.
   

Ancient ___ embodied for Yeats the union and subsequent transfiguration, through art, of the body and the holy idea.

 

Which of the following completes the passage?

1. Rome
   
2. Greece
   
3. Byzantium
   
4. Egypt
   
5. India
   

Which of the following wrote a revenge tragedy?

1. Ben Jonson
   
2. Webster
   
3. John Gay
   
4. Farquhar
   
5. Goldsmith
   

Which modern novel incorporates within it a Jacobean revenge tragedy?

1. The Waterfall
   
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude
   
3. The Crying of Lot 49
   
4. Jalousie
   
5. The Name of the Rose
   

“I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd, that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream.”

 

The “I” in the passage above is

1. Dashiel Hammett.
   
2. T. S. Eliot.
   
3. William Hazlitt.
   
4. Franz Kafka.
   
5. R. L. Stevenson.
   

He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—not shine nor serve—succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.

 

The writer referred to here is

1. Walt Whitman.
   
2. Ezra Pound.
   
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
   
4. Edgar Allan Poe.
   
5. Ernest Hemingway.
   

From which poem is the following lover's message?

 

Dear fatal name! rest ever unrevealed,
Nor pass these lips in holy silence sealed.
Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise,
Where mixed with God's, his loved idea lies.

1. “Epistle to Miss Blount”
   
2. “Eloisa to Abelard”
   
3. “Essay on Man”
   
4. “To a Lady”
   
5. “The Rape of the Lock”
   

Let us make an image of the soul, an ideal image of the soul, like the composite creations of ancient mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus; and there are many others to which two or more different natures are said to grow into one.

The writer's central admission is that

1. the soul does not exist without man's suppositions.
   
2. ideal images are composites of different natures.
   
3. mythical figures never existed.
   
4. images take on a life of their own after one imagines them.
   
5. concepts of the soul can best be found in ancient mythology.
   

The writer's reference point may best be described as

1. Platonic.
   
2. Aristotelian.
   
3. Christian.
   
4. gnostic.
   
5. organic.
   

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,
Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr-No, 'tis not even prose;

 

I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled
From those rare depths of should that have ne'er been excelled;
They're not epics, but that doesn't matter a pin,
In creating, the only hard thing's to begin:

The reference to “nails in temples” in the second line is an allusion to

1. the New Testament.
   
2. Greek fable.
   
3. the Seven Cities of Cibola.
   
4. the Old Testament.
   
5. Milton's
   Lysistrata.
   

This excerpt is similar to

1. an elegy.
   
2. a paean.
   
3. a contemporanium.
   
4. an encomium.
   
5. a satire.
   

This poem was written by

1. Henry David Thoreau.
   
2. William Cullen Bryant.
   
3. James Russell Lowell.
   
4. Walt Whitman.
   
5. John Greenleaf Whittier.
   

If you will aid me in this enterprise,
Then draw your weapons and be resolute;
If not, depart. Here will Benvolio die,
But________'s death shall quit my infamy.

This quote is properly completed with the name

1. Macbeth.
   
2. Romeo.
   
3. Faustus.
   
4. Martino.
   
5. Carolus.
   

The excerpt was written by

1. Ben Jonson.
   
2. Christopher Marlowe.
   
3. William Shakespeare.
   
4. Thomas Campion.
   
5. Robert Herrick.
   

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee

 

and eddieand bill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

 

when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisabel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

 

it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

 

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

The versification of the poem would be best classified as

1. iambic pentameter.
   
2. blank verse.
   
3. ballad stanza.
   
4. sprung rhythm.
   
5. free verse.
   

The tone is best described as

1. elegiac.
   
2. sarcastic.
   
3. laudatory.
   
4. whimsical.
   
5. devotional.
   

In which excerpt is the “I” character Huckleberry Finn?

1. Downstairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street. A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved closer to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.
   

2. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
   

3. Well, I got a good going-over in the morning, from old Miss Watson, on account of my clothes; but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could. Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed but nothing come of it.
   

4. The tower, I should have said, was square; and in every corner the step was made of a great stone of a different shape, to join the flights. Well, I had come close to one of these turns, when, feeling forward as usual, my hand slipped upon an edge and found nothing but emptiness beyond it. The stair had been carried no higher; to set a stranger mounting it in the darkness was to send him straight to his death;...
   

5. For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I'm going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.
   

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

 

Identify the above city.

1. Athens
   
2. Chicago
   
3. New York
   
4. Paris
   
5. London
   

The fog comes on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 

Identify the author of the above descriptive passage.

1. Charles Dickens
   
2. Ernest Hemingway
   
3. T. S. Eliot
   
4. Robert Frost
   
5. Carl Sandburg
   

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus' scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of battle, is described as to its nature and origin.”

—Auerbach,
Mimesis

 

Although the above statement refers to Homer's
Odyssey
, the idea, if applied to English literature, could best be illustrated with examples from

1. Shakespeare's
   King Lear.
   
2. Spenser's “The Faerie Queene.”
   
3. Chaucer's “The Miller's Tale.”
   
4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
   
5. Beowulf.
   

“Neo-classicism is characterized by clarity of statement, by objectivity, reason and tolerance in attitude, and by balance and symmetry in form.”

 

Which of the following would best illustrate this definition?

1. Blake's “Jerusalem”
   
2. Pope's “Essay on Criticism”
   
3. Donne's “The Ecstasy”
   
4. Smart's “A Song to David”
   
5. Traherne's “Wonder”