GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Identification of American Poetry
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
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Example Questions
Example Question #6 : Identification Of American Poetry After 1925
Which poet was the author of “We Real Cool” and was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize?
Maya Angelou
Richard Wright
Gwendolyn Brooks
Langston Hughes
Nina Simone
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry, which also includes titles such as “The Bean Eaters,” “Sadie and Maud,” “The Crazy Woman,” and “Speech to the Young,” drew on her experiences living in inner-city Chicago and was diverse in style, incorporating everything from sonnets to blues to free verse. Brooks, an important figure in twentieth-century African-American literature, served as the Poet Laureate of Illinois for many years.
Example Question #7 : Identification Of American Poetry After 1925
A leader of the Harlem Renaissance, this poet wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred.”
Amiri Baraka
Langston Hughes
Richard Wright
Maya Angelou
Rita Dove
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes wore many hats, including poet, novelist, playwright, and social justice advocate. He was an early innovator of the genre known as “jazz poetry,” which incorporates blues- and jazz-inspired rhythms and a sense of linguistic improvisation.
Example Question #31 : Identification Of American Poetry
Which modernist poet wrote “Baseball and Writing,” “He Made This Screen,” and “Poetry”?
John Dos Passos
Marianne Moore
Frank O’Hara
Anne Sexton
Mary Oliver
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is noted for her innovations and irony in her poems. She often eschewed formal meter and used animal motifs and interesting language to develop her themes, and she was known for criticizing the institution of poetry (as in her poem "Poetry").
Example Question #32 : Identification Of American Poetry
Who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?
Langston Hughes
Richard Wright
Rita Dove
Amiri Baraka
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou, a famous African-American poet and prose writer, is best known for her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and for her inspirational poetry. She published more than a dozen major works during her lifetime.
Example Question #33 : Identification Of American Poetry
Which poet is the author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and The Tennis Court Oath, two characteristically opaque and controversial poetry collections?
Anne Sexton
Frank O’Hara
Adrienne Rich
John Ashbery
John Dos Passos
John Ashbery
This contemporary postmodernist poet is John Ashbery. During his lifetime, Ashbery has produced more than a dozen volumes of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is known for its wordplay, surrealism, avant-garde syntax, and ability to resist critical analysis.
Example Question #34 : Identification Of American Poetry
Who is the author of the postmodernist poetry collection The Dream Songs?
Anne Sexton
Frank O’Hara
John Berryman
John Dos Passos
Elizabeth Bishop
John Berryman
John Berryman, a leading confessional and postmodern poet, is best known for the collection The Dream Songs, a compilation of his two books 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The work, which won the Pulitzer Prize, features a semi-autobiographical and identity-shifting character named Henry as well as a sometimes controversial appropriation of black language.
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