500+ Literary Criticism MCQs – Part 6: Keats, Shelley & Arnold

1. The quotation “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reasons” is a definition of:

1. Negative capability
2. Secondary imagination
3. Criticism of life
4. Dissociation of sensibility

2. In Keats’s letter to Bailey (November 1817): “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Which sentence follows this passage?

1. “Now I am sensible all this is a mere sophistication…”
2. “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he woke and found it true.”
3. “This however I am persuaded of, that nothing beside Imagination can give us sweet sensations…”
4. “My pains at last some respite shall afford…”

3. The term “egotistical sublime” was coined by:

1. S.T. Coleridge
2. John Keats
3. William Wordsworth
4. William Hazlitt

4. Whom did Keats regard as the prime example of ‘negative capability’?

1. John Milton
2. William Wordsworth
3. William Shakespeare
4. P.B. Shelley

5. “Negative Capability” is a term first used by which English Romantic poet?

1. John Keats
2. P. B. Shelley
3. Byron
4. Wordsworth

6. “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, – / Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve” — from “To Wordsworth”. Who is the poet?

1. Coleridge
2. Shelley
3. Byron
4. Keats

7. Which of Plato’s beliefs/acts was Shelley countering by saying “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”?

1. Banishment of poets from the republic
2. Distrust of value of poetry for mankind
3. Preference for legislators over poets
4. Description of poets as mad men

8. Shelley defends poetry against the attack of:

1. Robert Southey
2. Walter Scott
3. Thomas Love Peacock
4. Samuel T. Coleridge

9. Who says that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”?

1. Shelley
2. Walter Pater
3. Matthew Arnold
4. T. S. Eliot

10. Who says poetry can be defined as “the expression of the imagination”?

1. Wordsworth
2. Shelley
3. Coleridge
4. Matthew Arnold

11. A Defence of Poetry was written by:

1. P. B. Shelley
2. S. T. Coleridge
3. William Wordsworth
4. John Keats

12. In a 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey coined the term ‘Lake School of Poets’ grouping…

1. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Crabbe
2. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron
3. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt
4. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey

13. Who distinguished between “the literature of Knowledge” and “the literature of Power”?

1. Coleridge
2. De Quincey
3. Hazlitt
4. Lamb

14. The passage describing the quality of greatness beginning “No man is truly great, who is great only in his lifetime…” is taken from:

1. “Of Studies” by Francis Bacon
2. “The Indian Jugglers” by William Hazlitt
3. Preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson
4. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy by John Dryden

15. In which volume do you find a charming appreciation of the Wordsworth household by Thomas de Quincey?

1. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
2. Lives and Letters, Far Away and Long Ago
3. Notes on My Lake Country Evenings
4. Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets

16. Which work by a famous poet does Thomas de Quincey refer to as “the feeblest and least interesting” of his writings, “being substantially a mere versification…of common places”?

1. John Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
2. Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
3. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry
4. Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry

17. Which Romantic prose writer has been called “the critic’s critic”?

1. Lamb
2. De Quincey
3. Hazlitt
4. Landor

18. The line “Poetry is a criticism of life” occurs in:

1. Culture and Anarchy
2. Modern Painters
3. The Study of Poetry
4. Sartor Resartus

19. “Poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” Who made the above statement?

1. Dr. Johnson
2. Sidney
3. Matthew Arnold
4. Wordsworth

20. According to Matthew Arnold, what are the ‘touchstones’ that help us test truth and seriousness in poetry?

1. The purple passages of lyric poetry
2. Passages from ancient poets
3. The lines and expressions of the great masters
4. Passages of epic strength and vigour

21. “He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of __________ is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly most considerable in our language.” To whom does Matthew Arnold refer?

1. Edmund Spenser
2. John Keats
3. William Wordsworth
4. S.T. Coleridge

22. “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry… our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” This claim for poetry is made in:

1. Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry”
2. Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”
3. Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry”
4. Eliot’s Of Poetry and Poets

23. In his “Study of Poetry” Arnold cited ‘touchstones’ from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton. Which English poet did he disapprovingly call “not one of the great classics”?

1. Chaucer
2. Sidney
3. Spenser
4. Donne

24. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), Matthew Arnold contended that:

1. Creative and critical powers should be ranked equally
2. Creative and critical powers are not comparable in any way
3. Critical power should be ranked higher than creative power
4. Creative power should be ranked higher than critical power

25. In which of the following essays did Arnold put forward the ‘Touchstone Theory’?

1. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
2. “Culture and Anarchy”
3. “The Study of Poetry”
4. “The Literary Influence of Academics”

26. Who gave the concept of ‘Art for life’s sake’?

1. T. S. Eliot
2. Wordsworth
3. Matthew Arnold
4. Tennyson

27. Matthew Arnold is the author of which of the following works?

1. What is a Classic?
2. Appreciations
3. Essays in Criticism
4. The English Comic Writers

28. Who is generally called “the first modern critic” of the Western world?

1. Matthew Arnold
2. Wordsworth
3. I. A. Richards
4. William Empson

29. “The true and right meaning of the words classic and classical is the class of very best poetry.” Who says this?

1. Shelley
2. Keats
3. Matthew Arnold
4. Wordsworth

30. Who proposed the “Touchstone” method for literary evaluation?

1. Matthew Arnold
2. T. S. Eliot
3. I. A. Richards
4. F. R. Leavis

31. ………………… might be described as a moral or philosophical critic who argues that works must have “high seriousness.”

1. Eliot
2. Derrida
3. Arnold
4. C. S. Lewis

32. “The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us.” This assertion implies:

1. Poetry is more useful than other arts
2. All arts including poetry have limitations
3. Poetry has multiple functions to perform
4. Poetry has no real role to play

33. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” why does Matthew Arnold say the English poetry of the first quarter of the nineteenth century “did not know enough”?

1. The poets had no talent for fine diction
2. The reading public rejected serious poetry
3. There was no current of fresh ideas from criticism
4. The poets ignored nature and rural life

34. Who declared that criticism is “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world”?

1. John Dryden
2. Matthew Arnold
3. S. T. Coleridge
4. W. H. Auden

35. Who gave the concept of ‘Art for Art’s sake’?

1. Walter Pater
2. F. R. Leavis
3. T. S. Eliot
4. John Keats

36. Who is the author of the statement: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass”?

1. Arthur Symons
2. Benjamin Disraeli
3. W.B. Yeats
4. Oscar Wilde

37. ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is the cardinal doctrine of:

1. Naturalism
2. Aestheticism
3. Expressionism
4. Realism

38. “The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle, or the needle without the thread.” This passage is found in:

1. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
3. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
4. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism

39. Identify the incorrect factor in Henry James’ theory of the novel:

1. It should be sentimental
2. It should be objective
3. It should be realistic
4. It should be viewed as an artistic form

40. The author of the essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is:

1. George Eliot
2. Henry James
3. Oscar Wilde
4. Richard Steele

41. Thomas Carlyle’s phrases ‘Everlasting Nay’ and ‘Everlasting Yea’ came from:

1. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
2. Past and Present
3. Sartor Resartus
4. The French Revolution

42. Who defines criticism as the play of mind on the aesthetic qualities of literature?

1. Saintsbury
2. Atkins
3. Victor Hugo
4. Edmund Gosse

43. Who remarked, “There abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus and Coleridge”?

1. R. A. Scott-James
2. J. W. H. Atkins
3. George Saintsbury
4. T. S. Eliot