CLEP Humanities : Identifying Titles, Authors, or Schools of Nineteenth-Century Poetry
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for CLEP Humanities
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Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
What poet composed the long narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harolde's Pilgrimmage?
Lord Byron
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Edgar Allen Poe
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Lord Byron, an honorific noble title, was one of the great romantic poets and figures of the early nineteenth century. Byron was most well known for his lengthy and satiric epic poems, with both Don Juan and Childe Harolde's Pilgrimmage spanning over 10,000 lines of verse. Byron himself was a romantic hero, living a wild life and dying at the age of thirty-six in 1824.
Example Question #2 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
The American poet who wrote the poetry collection Leaves of Grass is __________.
William Carlos Williams
William Faulkner
Walt Whitman
Wallace Stevens
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
The collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised numerous times in new printings, gained its author Walt Whitman literary fame. Whitman's style was notable for featuring a direct style, rather than the typical reliance on metaphor, symbolism, and figures of speech that dominated nineteenth-century poetry. Included in Leaves of Grass were some of Whitman's most famous poems, including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
Example Question #3 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
The lengthy poem about a Native American chief The Song of Hiawatha was written by which American author?
Edgar Allen Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Francis Scott Key
Emily Dickinson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Song of Hiawatha, a lengthy epic in trochaic tetrameter about a Native American hero, was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855. The poem is a distinctively Romantic piece of literature, with a dashing tale about its hero and a sentimentalized story. Longfellow's poem was an instant success and became a national epic for America by the end of the nineteenth century.
Example Question #4 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
Who was the author of the poem that involves a visitor that only utters the word "nevermore"?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
William Butler Yeats
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
The poet Edgar Allen Poe composed and published "The Raven" in 1845, and it was an instant but controversial success. Immediately well-known by the masses, the poem, which deals with a raven visiting a lovelorn student, was scorned by many fellow poets and literary critics. The work, easily memorable for its refrain, remains well known to this day.
Example Question #5 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
Which poet wrote the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" about the death of Abraham Lincoln?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edgar Allen Poe
Henry David Thoreau
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
"O Captain! My Captain!" was a strange poem for Walt Whitman, as it both followed a fairly traditional structure and was anthologized in a book with different poets. Whitman does rhyme in his eulogy to Lincoln, but also adopts a non-orthodox scheme. The poem has become one of Whitman's most famous, as it was also included in his Leaves of Grass by that book's final edition.
Example Question #6 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
What poem begins with a sailor killing an albatross, which curses him throughout the poem?
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
"The Prelude"
Don Juan
"Ozymandias"
"Kubla Kahn"
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the near-mythical story of a sailor on a cursed ship in the arctic that encounters Death and misfortune after the sailor kills an albatross. The crew blame their luck on the mariner's killing of the albatross, and force him to wear it throughout the voyage.
Example Question #7 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Nineteenth Century Poetry
Which American poet wrote this poem?
Robert Frost
Emily Dickinson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
The passage contains the entirety of Walt Whitman's "America," a short poem published in his collection Leaves of Grass in 1855.
(Passage adapted from "America" by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).)
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