Modern and Contemporary Poetry MCQs 2026

Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" explores

1. A rubber hose on stage ✓
2. B forged bank notes ✓
3. C the sea and a woman's song shaping reality ✓
4. D caretaker's bucket ✓

Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" elegizes

1. A John Keats ✓
2. B Arthur Hallam ✓
3. C Abraham Lincoln ✓
4. D T.S. Eliot ✓

Frost's "Fire and Ice" debates whether

1. A sales or phonetics ✓
2. B Godot or boy ✓
3. C desire or hatred will destroy the world ✓
4. D Nora or Torvald ✓

Larkin's poetic tone is often described as

1. A heroically epic only ✓
2. B absurdist vaudeville only ✓
3. C Restoration fop only ✓
4. D melancholy, observational and anti-romantic ✓

Eliot's "The Hollow Men" ends

1. A "To strive, to seek, to find" ✓
2. B "Beauty is truth" ✓
3. C "I will arise and go" ✓
4. D "Not with a bang but a whimper" ✓

Eliot's Prufrock is set in a cityscape suggesting

1. A Xanadu pleasure-dome ✓
2. B London fog and social paralysis ✓
3. C Edenic bower ✓
4. D Arthurian Camelot ✓

Yeats's "Among School Children" asks

1. A "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" ✓
2. B "Do I dare to eat a peach?" ✓
3. C "What is truth?" ✓
4. D "Who is Godot?" ✓

Yeats's "Easter, 1916" commemorates

1. A American salesmen ✓
2. B London phoneticians ✓
3. C Irish rebels including Pearse and MacDonagh ✓
4. D Norwegian bankers ✓

Plath's "Lady Lazarus" declares

1. A "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons" ✓
2. B "I have nine lives" and ritual rebirth through suffering ✓
3. C "I am the master of my fate" ✓
4. D "To strive, to seek" ✓

Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" defines poetry as

1. A pure pastoral escapism only ✓
2. B mandatory rhyme royal only ✓
3. C phonetic instruction only ✓
4. D the mind pressing back against reality ✓

Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is

1. A a Victorian dramatic monologue ✓
2. B a Restoration comedy ✓
3. C a modernist series of haiku-like meditations ✓
4. D a sales dialogue ✓

Whitman's free verse relies on

1. A Spenserian nine-line stanzas only ✓
2. B cadenced catalog and parallel structure ✓
3. C strict heroic couplets only ✓
4. D Beckettian silence only ✓

Whitman's Civil War poems appear in

1. A Harmonium ✓
2. B Ariel ✓
3. C Lyrical Ballads ✓
4. D Drum-Taps ✓

Frost's "Birches" imagines a boy swinging birches toward

1. A heaven but returning earthward ✓
2. B Hell's Pandemonium only ✓
3. C Brooklyn only ✓
4. D Byzantium only ✓

Frost's "Mending Wall" repeats

1. A "Something is rotten" ✓
2. B "I contain multitudes" ✓
3. C "Good fences make good neighbors" ✓
4. D "Season of mists" ✓

Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings" describes

1. A a mariner's albatross ✓
2. B a duke's portrait ✓
3. C Satan's Pandemonium ✓
4. D a train journey past postwar wedding parties ✓

Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb" meditates on

1. A Godot's absent arrival ✓
2. B Willy's car crash ✓
3. C time eroding yet leaving a sculpted hand-hold ✓
4. D Eliza's vowels ✓

The opening "April is the cruellest month" belongs to

1. A "The Second Coming" ✓
2. B "Dover Beach" ✓
3. C "Ode to a Nightingale" ✓
4. D The Waste Land ✓

Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" argues poets must

1. A reject all predecessors ✓
2. B write only free verse ✓
3. C avoid all allusion ✓
4. D situate themselves within historical tradition ✓

Eliot's "Gerontion" presents

1. A an old man in a rented house reflecting on history's fragments ✓
2. B a young nightingale ✓
3. C a Restoration rake ✓
4. D a salesman's son ✓

Yeats's gyre theory appears in

1. A The Waste Land only ✓
2. B "The Second Coming" and A Vision ✓
3. C Leaves of Grass only ✓
4. D The Faerie Queene only ✓

Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" retells

1. A a sales flashback ✓
2. B a doll's party ✓
3. C a phonetics exam ✓
4. D a Greek myth of violent divine conception ✓

Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" rejects

1. A sales commissions ✓
2. B caretaker jobs ✓
3. C natural generation for artistic permanence ✓
4. D forged loans ✓

Plath's Ariel collection includes

1. A "Ulysses" and "Mariana" ✓
2. B "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" ✓
3. C "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" ✓
4. D "Prufrock" and "Gerontion" ✓

Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" uses imagery of

1. A Arthurian weavers only ✓
2. B Restoration dowries only ✓
3. C Nazism and vampirism to confront patriarchal trauma ✓
4. D phonetic drills only ✓

Stevens's "Sunday Morning" questions

1. A whether sales require rubber hose ✓
2. B whether beauty requires heavenly paradise ✓
3. C whether Godot will come ✓
4. D whether Nora forged notes ✓

Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is set at

1. A Xanadu's dome ✓
2. B Tintern's Wye ✓
3. C a funeral wake with domestic bluntness ✓
4. D Brooklyn sales office ✓

Whitman's "Song of Myself" contains the line

1. A "I dare not eat a peach" ✓
2. B "Something is rotten" ✓
3. C "I contain multitudes" ✓
4. D "Attention must be paid" ✓

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass celebrates

1. A democratic self and the American body politic ✓
2. B Arthurian knights only ✓
3. C Restoration rakes only ✓
4. D Norwegian dolls only ✓

Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ends with

1. A "Not with a bang but a whimper" ✓
2. B "And miles to go before I sleep" ✓
3. C "Beauty is truth" ✓
4. D "I will arise and go now" ✓

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" explores

1. A choice and retrospective self-mythologizing ✓
2. B Puritan election only ✓
3. C Restoration contract law ✓
4. D phonetic class war ✓

Larkin's "This Be The Verse" bluntly begins

1. A "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" ✓
2. B "April is the cruellest month" ✓
3. C "I wandered lonely as a cloud" ✓
4. D "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" ✓

W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" opens with

1. A the falcon not hearing the falconer ✓
2. B daffodils beside a lake ✓
3. C a nightingale in a forest ✓
4. D a rubber hose on stage ✓

Yeats's "The Second Coming" prophesies a rough beast

1. A sailing toward Ithaca ✓
2. B walking to Canterbury ✓
3. C driving to Boston ✓
4. D slouching toward Bethlehem to be born ✓

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) reflects

1. A Victorian faith certainty ✓
2. B post-World War I spiritual desolation ✓
3. C Restoration marriage wit ✓
4. D sales success myths only ✓

The epigraph of The Waste Land alludes to

1. A the Cumaean Sibyl wishing to die ✓
2. B Keats's nightingale ✓
3. C Wordsworth's daffodils ✓
4. D Browning's duke ✓

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot is

1. A a dramatic interior monologue of hesitation ✓
2. B a Spenserian allegory ✓
3. C a sales requiem ✓
4. D a doll's house slam ✓

Prufrock's famous question includes

1. A "Do I dare to eat a peach?" ✓
2. B "How do I love thee?" ✓
3. C "To be or not to be" ✓
4. D "What is truth?" ✓

Philip Larkin's "Church Going" treats

1. A Godot's roadside tree ✓
2. B Willy's car ✓
3. C Higgins's lab ✓
4. D a secular visitor's puzzled respect for empty churches ✓

Confessional poetry of the 1950s–60s includes

1. A Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate ✓
2. B Plath, Sexton and Lowell ✓
3. C Congreve, Wycherley and Vanbrugh ✓
4. D Spenser, Sidney and Raleigh ✓

Plath's "Tulips" contrasts hospital whiteness with

1. A green thought in shade ✓
2. B violent red tulips invading recovery ✓
3. C Alph's sacred river ✓
4. D Wye's sylvan Wye ✓

Stevens's "The Snow Man" requires a mind of winter to perceive

1. A nothing that is not there and the nothing that is ✓
2. B only nightingale song ✓
3. C only daffodil crowds ✓
4. D only rubber hose ✓

Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" affirms

1. A identity across time with future commuters ✓
2. B Ulysses's crew only ✓
3. C the Duke's portrait only ✓
4. D Prufrock's peach only ✓

Frost's "After Apple-Picking" drifts toward

1. A Godot's waking ✓
2. B dreamy exhaustion after harvest ✓
3. C Higgins's lesson ✓
4. D Stockmann's lecture ✓

Larkin's "High Windows" juxtaposes

1. A Satan's rebellion ✓
2. B Mirabell's plot ✓
3. C youthful sexual freedom with poet's aging envy ✓
4. D Willy's flashbacks ✓

Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" yearns for

1. A Brooklyn requiems ✓
2. B peaceful natural retreat from urban noise ✓
3. C London drawing rooms ✓
4. D Oslo courts ✓

Eliot's Four Quartets meditate on

1. A sales routes only ✓
2. B phonetic bets only ✓
3. C caretaker squabbles only ✓
4. D time, memory and spiritual intersection ✓

Imagism (associated with early Eliot and Pound) urged

1. A direct treatment of the thing, economy of language ✓
2. B lengthy Victorian narrative digression ✓
3. C mandatory rhyme royal ✓
4. D exclusive pastoral diction ✓

Modernist poetry often features

1. A unbroken medieval fabliau only ✓
2. B uniform heroic couplets only ✓
3. C exclusive sales realism only ✓
4. D fragmentation, allusion and irony ✓

Plath's confessional mode is associated with

1. A Spenserian allegory only ✓
2. B autobiographical extremity and mythic persona ✓
3. C Restoration contract wit only ✓
4. D Victorian dramatic monologue only ✓