Modern Poetry

Question 1

Where was T.S. Eliot born?

Answer 1

St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family,

Question 2

When did Eliot moved to England?

Answer 2

1914 at the age of 25 and became British in 1927 at the age of 39.

Question 3

When did Eliot win the Nobel prize?

Answer 3

1948

Question 4

Who was the editor of Poetry Magazine in 1915?

Answer 4

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine

Question 5

Who published Prufrock?

Answer 5

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine’s founder to publish it

Question 6

When was The Wasteland published?

Answer 6

October 1922 in The Criterion

Question 7

Who was The Wasteland dedicated to?

Answer 7

Eliot’s dedication to il miglior fabbro (“the better craftsman”) refers to Ezra Pound’s significant hand in editing it.

Question 8

What are the five parts of The Wasteland?

Answer 8

The Burial of the Dead. In it, the narrator describes the seasons. Spring brings “memory and desire,” and so the narrator’s memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a “hyacinth girl.” The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of “stony rubbish.”

A Game of Chess. It transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. Then to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. From upper class to London’s low-life.

The Fire Sermon. The Fire Sermon” opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks laments the state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young “carbuncular” man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, to make love to her and then leave. The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similar man.

Death by Water. It describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water – perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke. He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” and that he should “fear death by water.” Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.
What the Thunder Said: It shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it uses three words from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata”: to give, to sympathize, to control.

Question 9

When was the Hollow Men published?

Answer 9

1925

Question 10

Summary of Hollow Men

Answer 10

The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot’s most famous lines, notably its conclusion:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Eliot’s characters often undergo a journey – either physical or spiritual or both. The Hollow Men seems to follow the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These “hollow men” have the realization, humility and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls.
The “hollow men” fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfilment. This awareness of the split between thought and action coupled with their awareness of “death’s various kingdoms” and acute diagnosis of their hollowness, makes it hard for them to go forward and break through their spiritual sterility. And as the poem and their journey ends, they see “the horror, the horror” that Kurtz sees in the Heart of Darkness. There is a complete breakdown of language, prayer and the spirit as “the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper”.

Question 11

Ash Wednesday was published in?

Answer 11

1930

after he converted to Anglicanism

Question 12

Summary of Ash Wednesday

Answer 12

It deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem”, deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot’s subject matter also became more focused on his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.

Question 13

What are the four poems of Four Quartrets?

Answer 13

It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire.

Question 14

Summary of Burnt Norton

Answer 14

Burnt Norton begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the roses, clouds, and an empty pool. The narrator’s meditation leads him/her to reach “the still point” in which he doesn’t try to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing “a grace of sense”. In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts (“Words” and “music”) as they relate to time.

Question 15

Summary of East Coker, Dry Salvages and Little Gidding

Answer 15

East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.”
The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: “The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.”
Little Gidding Eliot’s experiences as an air raid warden in the Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Danteduring the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets (“Houses / Are removed, destroyed”) had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.”

Question 16

Which poem of Eliot mentions Measure for Measure?

Answer 16

Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Question 17

Summary of Gerontion

Answer 17

The poem itself is a dramatic monologue by an elderly character that critics believe to be an older version of “J. Alfred Prufrock”. The use of pronouns such as “us” and “I” regarding the speaker and a member of the opposite sex as well as the general discourse in lines 53–58, in the opinion of Anthony David Moody, presents the same sexual themes that face Prufrock, only this time they meet with the body of an older man. The poem contains six stanzas of free verse describing the relationship between the narrator and the world around him, ending with a couplet that declares,

Question 18

Who founded Abbey Theatre?

Answer 18

Yeats

Question 19

Who was the Senator of the Irish Free State?

Answer 19

Yeats

Question 20

Where was Yeats Born?

Answer 20

Sandymount, Ireland

Question 21

Summary of Second Coming

Answer 21

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
It is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

Question 22

Where did Yeats write the theory of the Second Coming?

Answer 22

In A Vision. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).
Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:

Question 23

Where was Sailing to Byzantium published?

Answer 23

“Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten-syllable lines. It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge.

Question 24

Summary of Sailing to Byzantium?

Answer 24

The poem describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

It is a definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body).

Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city’s famous gold mosaics could become the “singing-masters” of his soul.

He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in “the artifice of eternity.”

In the final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past (“what is past”), the present (that which is “passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).

Question 25

Summary of Among School Children?

Answer 25

In Among School Children the speaker paces around a classroom, looking at the schoolchildren. The nun says that what they learn in school is to read and to sing. They learn about history, sewing, and how to be neat “in a modern way.” The children stare at the speaker, an old politician.
He dreams of a Leda-like body bent over a fire in a domestic scene. She is telling a story of how a small interaction with a child turned its day to tragedy. Together, over the story, they share a great deal. Looking at the children, he wonders what she was like at their age. He sees her as a child and is mad with love.
Her current, gaunt image comes to mind. She once was pretty, but she is now comfortable and old. Did the speaker’s mother, when carrying him, know that seeing this woman would be enough compensation for her child’s birth?
Nuns and mothers adore images, but the mothers’ images are their children. The speaker questions life’s very location, wondering what part of a tree is the essence of the tree, what part of a dancer is a dancer, and which is the dance itself.
The children are poignant for the speaker because they are associated both with an obvious type of innocence and with the woman whom the speaker loves. By comparing her child self and her current incarnation, it is sharply evident to the speaker how she has aged. The imagined conversation between the two, in which she seems to be a schoolteacher rather than a revolutionary, is wishful thinking on his part. Yeats’ musings on whether it was destined that he should fall in love with this woman is related to “Leda and the Swan” in that it presupposes a series of events that must come to pass. The final stanza is a philosophical riddle concerning whether man acts or is acted upon, and serves as a connection to Yeats’ uncertainty as to whether he loves or was destined to love.

Question 26

Which poem was Auden known for?

Answer 26

He is best known for love poems such as “Funeral Blues”; poems on political and social themes such as “September 1, 1939” and “The Shield of Achilles”; poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety; and poems on religious themes such as “For the Time Being” and “Horae Canonicae”

Question 27

Who wrote “ Musée des Beaux Arts “ (French for “Museum of Fine Arts”)

Answer 27

” Musée des Beaux Arts “ (French for “Museum of Fine Arts”) is a poem written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood.
It was first published under the title “Palais des beaux arts” (Palace of Fine Arts) in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann/

Question 28

Summary of “ Musée des Beaux Arts “ (French for “Museum of Fine Arts”)

Answer 28

Auden’s free verse poem is divided into two parts,
the first of which describes scenes of “suffering” and “dreadful martyrdom” which rarely break into our quotidian routines: “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully / along.”

The second half of the poem refers, through the poetic device of ekphrasis, to the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560s), at the time thought to be by Bruegel, but now usually regarded as an early copy of a lost work.

Auden’s description allows us to visualize this specific moment and instance of the indifference of others to a distant individual’s suffering, inconsequent to them, “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster … the white legs disappearing into the green.”

The disaster in question is the fall of Icarus, caused by his flying too close to the sun and melting his waxen wings.