GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Identification
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #11 : Identification Of World Poetry
Which when Ulysses heard, Hero renown’d,
Adjusting close the lid, he cast a cord
Around it which with many a mazy knot
He tied, by Circe taught him long before.
And now, the mistress of the household charge
Summon’d him to his bath; glad he beheld
The steaming vase, uncustom’d to its use
E’er since his voyage from the isle of fair
Calypso, although, while a guest with her,
Ever familiar with it, as a God.
These lines are from which epic poem?
The Divine Comedy
The Aeneid
The Odyssey
The Iliad
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Odyssey
This excerpt is identifiable as Homer’s Odyssey because of the characters mentioned: Ulysses (Odysseus), a Greek hero who fought in the Trojan War and is on a ten-year journey to return home to his native Ithaca; Circe, an enchantress and Ulysses’ lover; and Calypso, a beautiful nymph who falls in love with and imprisons Ulysses. Other characters in this epic poem, which was written around the same time as the Iliad, are Penelope, Telemachus, Polyphemus, Scylla, Charybdis, Zeus, and Tiresias.
Passage adapted from The Odyssey, l.547-556 (trans. Cowper 1791)
Example Question #1 : Identification Of World Poetry After 1925
Which major Caribbean poet wrote The Arrivants, Middle Passages, and Born to Slow Horses?
Stanley French
Ama Ata Aidoo
Kamau Brathwaite
Jean “Binta” Breeze
Aimé Césaire
Kamau Brathwaite
This is Kamau Brathwaite, a Barbados-born poet and author of critical works such as History of the Voice and The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica.
Example Question #63 : Identification
Which Nobel Prize-winning Eastern European poet wrote The World, City Without a Name, and The Unencompassed Earth?
Grigori Dashevsky
Wisława Szymborska
Czesław Miłosz
Joseph Brodsky
Jan Polkowski
Czesław Miłosz
This is the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who is also known for his nonfiction book denouncing Stalin titled The Captive Mind. Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980.
Example Question #62 : Identification
Which Nobel Prize-winning Eastern European poet wrote Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems, On Grief and Reason, and To Urania?
Jan Polkowski
Joseph Brodsky
Czesław Miłosz
Grigori Dashevsky
Wisława Szymborska
Czesław Miłosz
This is the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991.
Example Question #63 : Identification
The Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze wrote all of the following except which collection of poetry?
Riddym Ravings and Other Poems
Sea Grapes
The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems
Third World Girl
The Fifth Figure
Sea Grapes
Sea Grapes is a 1976 poetry collection by Derek Walcott.
Example Question #64 : Identification
Which Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet wrote Omeros, a contemporary Caribbean epic poem that loosely reimagines Homer’s Iliad?
Ama Ata Aidoo
Derek Walcott
Kamau Brathwaite
Stanley French
Aimé Césaire
Derek Walcott
This is the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, an important post-colonial writer. Omeros was published in 1990 and contains characters with mythical names such as Achille, Hector, and Helen, although the work itself is set primarily in modern-day St. Lucia.
Example Question #65 : Identification
Which Caribbean poet wrote the seminal book-length poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land?
Aimé Césaire
René Depestre
Kamau Brathwaite
Ama Ata Aidoo
Stanley French
Aimé Césaire
This is the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, an important founder of négritude in French-language literature. Césaire’s work also includes plays such as A Tempest (based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and critical essays such as Discourse on Colonialism. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land was first published in 1939 in France.
Example Question #68 : Identification Of Poetry
What is contemporary Japanese poetry called?
haiku
tanka
shi
waka
gendai-shi
gendai-shi
All of these terms except “gendai-shi” refer to older, more traditional forms of Japanese poetry.
Example Question #66 : Identification
Which of the following works is by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam?
“The Overcoat”
Pale Fire
Verses on the Unknown Soldier
“The Lady with the Dog”
Notes from the Underground
Verses on the Unknown Soldier
“The Lady with the Dog” is by Anton Chekhov, “The Overcoat” is by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Notes from the Underground is by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Pale Fire is by Vladimir Nabokov.
Example Question #21 : Identification Of World Poetry
Which Latin American poet wrote odes to age, ironing, socks, tomatoes, and birdwatching?
Jorge Luis Borges
Pablo Neruda
Octavio Paz
Mario Vargas Llosa
César Vallejo
Pablo Neruda
This is the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
