All CLEP Humanities Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #66 : Clep: Humanities
The poet who wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land was __________.
Wallace Stevens
T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
William Butler Yeats
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot became one of the masters of Modernist poetry with the publication of his 1915 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot was even more lauded for his 1922 poem, The Waste Land. Eliot's poems were lengthy ruminations on the alienation of modern society, and he broke with traditional poetic forms by writing each in inventive blank verse.
Example Question #67 : Clep: Humanities
Which poet wrote the modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1915?
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
T. S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wilfred Owen
T. S. Eliot
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" announced T. S. Eliot's arrival on the literary stage, as its publication in 1915 immediately brought the poet notoriety. As the first poem of Eliot's to reach an audience, it bore the hallmarks of his style, with a weight of allusions to literature, while also using dark imagery to create a new form of poetry. In particular, the poem owes a massive debt to Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, while obviously taking place in a modern, industrialized world.
Example Question #7 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Twentieth Century Poetry
"My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I danced in the Nile when I was old
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset."
(1921)
Who is the author of the poem from which this excerpt is taken?
W. E. B. DuBois
Maya Angelou
Zora Neale Hurston
William Carlos Williams
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
The poem from which the passage is excerpted, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," was written in 1920 by Langston Hughes, an influential poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
(Passage adapted from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes (1921).)
Example Question #68 : Clep: Humanities
Which poet wrote "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and "The Heart of a Woman"?
Maya Angelou
Robert Frost
Allen Ginsberg
Anne Bradstreet
Emily Dickinson
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was the author of both of these poems, in which she depicts the life of an African-American woman in mid-twentieth-century America.
Example Question #11 : Identifying Titles, Authors, Or Schools Of Twentieth Century Poetry
Federico Garcia Lorca is well-known among the art community for creating what kind(s) of artistic works?
Realistic landscape paintings
Ceramic vases
Abstract expressionist paintings
Children's literature
Poetry and drama
Poetry and drama
Lorca is a well-known Spanish poet and dramatist; among his works are Odes and Suites, which are each collections of poetry, and El Publico (The Public), a play.
Example Question #71 : Clep: Humanities
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
(1922)
In the third line of the above poem, what poetic device is used?
Alliteration
Assonance
Onomatopoeia
Internal rhyme
Feminine rhyme
Alliteration
The third line reads "In kitchen cups concupiscent curds," featuring the hard "c" sound at the beginning of four words. Such repetition of one sound at the beginning of words in one sentence or phrase is known as "alliteration."
(Passage adapted from "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens.)
Example Question #71 : Clep: Humanities
Which of the following writers is NOT a modernist poet?
E. E. Cummings
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
William Wordsworth
T. S. Eliot
William Wordsworth
Modernism was a movement that spread through many different forms of art in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Modernism rejected what the artists saw as outdated modes. In poetry, the movement was summed up by Ezra Pound's advice to "Make it new!" and Wallace Stevens' use of blank verse, along with T. S. Eliot's writing lengthy epics of mundane life, and E.E. Cummings' reshaping the physical look of poetry. Many modernists were intentionally rejecting the romantic poets like William Wordsworth.
Example Question #72 : Clep: Humanities
Which modernist poet is famous for his admonition to "Make it new?"
William Carlos Williams
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
James Joyce
Wallace Stevens
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was an American who made his career in literature in England in the years before World War I, both in his own work and by helping edit and encourage many other poets. His motto was "Make it new," encouraging his fellow poets to create new forms, new modes of descriptions, and new concepts. Pound was a controversial figure, alienating those close to him in his personal life and finding an enthusiasm for Fascism in the 1930s.
Example Question #71 : Clep: Humanities
What poet composed the long narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harolde's Pilgrimmage?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Edgar Allen Poe
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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 #72 : Clep: Humanities
The American poet who wrote the poetry collection Leaves of Grass is __________.
William Faulkner
Wallace Stevens
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
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."
Certified Tutor