The first stanza of Countee Cullen’s “A Brown Girl Dead” reads: “With two white roses on her breasts,/White candles at head and feet,/Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;/Lord Death has found her sweet.” Which of the following statements accurately characterizes these lines ?

A. These lines evoke christian imagery to emphasize the dignity of the girl who died.
B. These lines evoke christian imagery to suggest that death erases racial divisions.
C. These lines present the problem of racial prejudice in an ironic mode.
D. Both a and b

Which of the following traditions was an important influence on Louis Zukofsky’s poetry ?

A. American romanticism
B. British neo-classicism
C. Kabalistic judaism
D. Taosim

Which of the following best characterizes the contrast between Gertrude Stein’s poetry and Imagist poetry ?

A. Stein experimented only with the sound qualities of language, whereas the imagists focused on visual imagery.
B. Stein experimented with language that skirted the edges of sense, whereas the imagists sought precision and clarity of expression.
C. Stein sought to combine classical poetic form with contemporary content, whereas the imagists used traditional poetic subject matter but experimented with form.
D. Stein sought precision and clarity in her poems, whereas the imagists sought experimental forms that enhanced visual imagery.

According to the literary critic, Paul Fussell, which of the following was a central trope of English poetry written during the Great War ?

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

According to Professor Hammer, Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the imagination has most in common with which of the following literary traditions ?

A. Imagism
B. Classicism
C. British romanticism
D. Vorticism

Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” opens with the following lines: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.” Which of the following statements best describes these lines and Brooke’s poem as a whole ?

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.

In Amy Lowell’s imagist poem, “This Green Bowl,” a handmade bowl is compared to a pond in the woods. Can one say that, as in Pound’s “Cantos,” this poem’s dominant tone is impersonal? Why, or why not ?

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

What is the “double-bind” that African- American women poets encountered in the thirties and forties, according to Anthony Walton’s essay ?

A. Being overworked in menial jobs having to raise large families
B. Being a subordinated woman in a male dominated culture and a member of a suppressed minority race in the middle of a dominant white culture
C. Having little formal education with little access to publishers
D. Being ignored by a traditional poetry reading public because what they wrote about was the travails of subsistence living

Complete the following sentence. Professor Hammer argues that Ezra Pound’s interest in fascism and his anti-Semitic views were likely an outcome of his______________?

A. Endorsement of marxism.
B. Interest in ancient rome.
C. Anti-capitalism.
D. Interest in fourier’s utopian socialist thought.

The poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” ends with the following lines: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.” Which of the following statements best describes these lines ?

A. Brooke’s inclusion of a quotation from horace in these lines serves to emphasize
The distance between the ideals ofwestern civilization and its realities.
B. These lines suggest the author’s anger and disillusionment with cultural norms which glorify war.
C. In these lines, brooke seeks to bridge the gap between individual experience and cultural norms and beliefs.