Romantic and Victorian Poetry MCQs 2026

The portrait of the last duchess in Browning's poem is

1. A burned like Lovborg's book ✓
2. B sold with rubber hose ✓
3. C left on a country road ✓
4. D hidden behind a curtain ✓

"Porphyria's Lover" by Browning ends with the speaker

1. A strangling Porphyria and sitting with her corpse ✓
2. B departing a doll's house ✓
3. C waiting for Godot ✓
4. D winning a phonetic bet ✓

Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's" satirizes

1. A clerical vanity and Renaissance corruption ✓
2. B Puritan plain style only ✓
3. C Cockney vowels only ✓
4. D caretaker silence only ✓

Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads aimed to use

1. A Latin epic only ✓
2. B courtly French only ✓
3. C the language of men in poetry ✓
4. D sales jargon exclusively ✓

Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" celebrates

1. A rubber samples ✓
2. B rubbish in Aston's room ✓
3. C daffodils remembered with inward bliss ✓
4. D forged loans ✓

Coleridge's Biographia Literaria theorizes

1. A imagination primary and secondary ✓
2. B sales tragedy ✓
3. C Restoration contracts ✓
4. D Ibsen's slam ✓

Shelley's "To a Skylark" addresses the bird as

1. A a salesman's brother ✓
2. B a doll's child ✓
3. C a caretaker tramp ✓
4. D a "blithe spirit" unbodied joy ✓

Shelley's Adonais is an elegy for

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

Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" draws on

1. A Restoration comedy plot ✓
2. B medieval ballad tradition of fairy enchantress ✓
3. C naturalistic sales dialogue ✓
4. D Pinter menace only ✓

Keats's "When I have fears that I may cease to be" meditates on

1. A Godot's lateness ✓
2. B unfulfilled love and fame before death ✓
3. C Higgins's vowels ✓
4. D Torvald's promotion ✓

Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" is based on

1. A Peer Gynt's troll king ✓
2. B Willy's Boston woman ✓
3. C Arthurian legend of a cursed weaver ✓
4. D Davies's shoes ✓

Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as

1. A Dean of St Paul's ✓
2. B Latin Secretary ✓
3. C Caretaker of Mick's house ✓
4. D Poet Laureate ✓

Browning's Pauline was his

1. A youthful debut poem ✓
2. B last sales dialogue ✓
3. C final Beckett mime ✓
4. D Ibsen's last slam ✓

Browning married

1. A Elizabeth Barrett Browning ✓
2. B Millamant ✓
3. C Nora Helmer ✓
4. D Eliza Doolittle ✓

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese includes

1. A "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" ✓
2. B "Beauty is truth" ✓
3. C "Season of mists" ✓
4. D "I have measured out my life" ✓

Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" laments the

1. A rise of phonetics teaching ✓
2. B success of rubber sales ✓
3. C arrival of Godot ✓
4. D ebb of religious faith in the modern world ✓

Arnold's cultural criticism urges

1. A "attention must be paid" ✓
2. B "sweetness and light" against philistinism ✓
3. C "better to reign in Hell" ✓
4. D "do I dare" ✓

The Romantic "sublime" often involves

1. A comic marriage contracts only ✓
2. B awe mixing terror and grandeur in nature ✓
3. C sales quotas only ✓
4. D silent caretaker pauses only ✓

Wordsworth's Prelude is a

1. A Restoration comedy of manners ✓
2. B Norwegian problem play ✓
3. C autobiographical epic of the poet's mind ✓
4. D absurdist road piece ✓

Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" addresses his

1. A sister Dorothy only ✓
2. B Duke of Ferrara ✓
3. C infant son Hartley ✓
4. D Dr Stockmann ✓

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is a

1. A sales tragedy in Brooklyn ✓
2. B doll's house realism ✓
3. C caretaker comedy ✓
4. D lyrical drama of liberation ✓

Keats's Hyperion (and Fall of Hyperion) engages

1. A Restoration rakes ✓
2. B Titanic overthrow by Olympian gods ✓
3. C American salesmen ✓
4. D London tramps ✓

Tennyson's Maud includes the line

1. A "I am the master of my fate" ✓
2. B "Not with a bang" ✓
3. C "That is no country for old men" ✓
4. D "The fault was mine" in a passionate lyric sequence ✓

Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" defends

1. A blank Puritan denial only ✓
2. B absurdist waiting only ✓
3. C phonetic snobbery only ✓
4. D realistic art and fleshly life against ascetic censorship ✓

Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" is spoken by

1. A Ulysses the sailor ✓
2. B the Ancient Mariner ✓
3. C a Florentine painter regretting domestic compromise ✓
4. D Godot's boy ✓

The Victorian era in literature roughly spans

1. A 1660–1700 only ✓
2. B 1914–1945 only ✓
3. C Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901) ✓
4. D 1558–1603 only ✓

Romanticism reacted against

1. A Metaphysical wit only ✓
2. B Anglo-Saxon alliteration only ✓
3. C Beat spontaneity only ✓
4. D Neoclassical emphasis on reason and decorum ✓

Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems meditate on

1. A sales failure in Boston ✓
2. B idealized rural death and loss ✓
3. C phonetic class war ✓
4. D caretaker eviction ✓

Coleridge's "Christabel" is a

1. A comic proviso scene ✓
2. B Gothic ballad fragment with supernatural Geraldine ✓
3. C sales requiem ✓
4. D Ibsen slam ✓

Shelley's "England in 1819" attacks

1. A a young phonetics tutor ✓
2. B a doll's child ✓
3. C a waiting boy ✓
4. D an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king ✓

Tennyson's Idylls of the King retells

1. A Arthurian legends as Victorian moral allegory ✓
2. B Peer Gynt's trolls ✓
3. C Godot's road ✓
4. D Pygmalion's lab ✓

Browning's The Ring and the Book is

1. A a long novel-in-verse of a Roman murder case ✓
2. B a single sales monologue ✓
3. C one nightingale ode ✓
4. D a 14-line sonnet only ✓

The phrase "Victorian compromise" in poetry often refers to

1. A pure Restoration wit ✓
2. B pure absurdism ✓
3. C tension between science doubt and residual faith ✓
4. D pure fabliau ✓

Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us" criticizes

1. A materialism and loss of wonder in nature ✓
2. B rubber hose theft ✓
3. C forged promissory notes ✓
4. D caretaker squabbles ✓

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" explores

1. A sales success in Omaha ✓
2. B paralysis of imaginative joy ✓
3. C phonetic victory ✓
4. D doll's house freedom ✓

Shelley's "Mont Blanc" contemplates

1. A Brooklyn apartments ✓
2. B London slums ✓
3. C the mountain's power and mind's relation to universe ✓
4. D Oslo banks ✓

Keats's "Bright star" sonnet wishes to

1. A reign in Hell ✓
2. B strive and not yield ✓
3. C live unchangeably like a star yet with head on lover's breast ✓
4. D wait for Godot ✓

Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" metaphorically faces

1. A a sales meeting ✓
2. B a phonetics test ✓
3. C death as a sunset voyage ✓
4. D a shed completion ✓

Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" reveals

1. A pastoral daffodils ✓
2. B nightingale music ✓
3. C skylark flight ✓
4. D monastic hatred through grotesque detail ✓

William Wordsworth is a central figure of

1. A Metaphysical wit ✓
2. B Restoration comedy ✓
3. C English Romantic poetry ✓
4. D Theatre of the Absurd ✓

Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" reflects on

1. A urban sales failure ✓
2. B nature's restorative power and memory over five years ✓
3. C phonetic wagers ✓
4. D caretaker threats ✓

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth addresses

1. A Lady Wishfort ✓
2. B Linda Loman ✓
3. C Hedda Gabler ✓
4. D his sister Dorothy ✓

Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity" appears in

1. A Paradise Lost ✓
2. B The Way of the World ✓
3. C Waiting for Godot ✓
4. D the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ✓

Samuel Taylor Coleridge co-authored with Wordsworth

1. A The Faerie Queene ✓
2. B Lyrical Ballads (1798) ✓
3. C Harmonium ✓
4. D Ariel ✓

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is presented as

1. A a sales ledger ✓
2. B a fragment from an opium dream ✓
3. C a doll's house deed ✓
4. D a caretaker contract ✓

The pleasure-dome in "Kubla Khan" is decreed at

1. A Brooklyn ✓
2. B Dublin ✓
3. C Oslo ✓
4. D Xanadu ✓

The "sacred river" in Kubla Khan is

1. A the Wye ✓
2. B the Alph ✓
3. C the Lethe only in Eliot ✓
4. D the Hudson ✓

Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" features

1. A a rubber hose ✓
2. B a forged note ✓
3. C an albatross shot by the mariner ✓
4. D a phonograph ✓

Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" ends urging

1. A "Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!" ✓
2. B "Attention must be paid" ✓
3. C "Beauty is truth" ✓
4. D "I will arise and go now" ✓

Shelley's "Ozymandias" ironically depicts

1. A a living king in London ✓
2. B a successful salesman ✓
3. C a waiting tramp ✓
4. D a ruined colossus in the desert ✓

John Keats's odes include

1. A "Kubla Khan" and "Tintern Abbey" ✓
2. B "The Second Coming" and "Prufrock" ✓
3. C "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ✓
4. D "Ulysses" and "My Last Duchess" ✓

Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" concludes that

1. A "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" ✓
2. B "Death shall die" ✓
3. C "Attention must be paid" ✓
4. D "Something is rotten" ✓

"Ode to a Nightingale" contrasts the bird's song with

1. A human mortality and weariness ✓
2. B sales commissions ✓
3. C phonetic drills ✓
4. D caretaker keys ✓

Keats coined "negative capability" to mean

1. A absolute comic closure ✓
2. B being in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact ✓
3. C strict Restoration wit ✓
4. D mandatory rhymed morals ✓

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" presents the hero

1. A waiting passively for Godot ✓
2. B teaching Eliza speech ✓
3. C restless for new adventure despite age ✓
4. D blackmailing Torvald ✓

The famous closing line of Tennyson's "Ulysses" is

1. A "Not with a bang but a whimper" ✓
2. B "I shall be telling this with a sigh" ✓
3. C "Do I dare to eat a peach" ✓
4. D "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" ✓

Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. mourns

1. A Edward King only in Lycidas ✓
2. B Arthur Henry Hallam ✓
3. C Willy Loman ✓
4. D Andrew Marvell ✓

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Tennyson commemorates

1. A the Fall of Man ✓
2. B a Crimean War cavalry disaster ✓
3. C a phonetics exam ✓
4. D a doll's house party ✓

Robert Browning is master of the

1. A dramatic monologue ✓
2. B Spenserian stanza only ✓
3. C absurdist pause only ✓
4. D sales flashback only ✓

"My Last Duchess" by Browning is spoken by

1. A the Duke of Ferrara ✓
2. B Ulysses the sailor king ✓
3. C the Ancient Mariner ✓
4. D Prufrock the clerk ✓