500+ Literary Criticism MCQs – Part 4: Pope, Addison & Dr Johnson

1. Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” sums up the art of poetry as taught first by:

1. Aristotle
2. Horace
3. Longinus
4. Plato

2. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ can best be read as a poem of:

1. Classical understanding of nature
2. Anti-romantic view of life
3. Sociological estimate of man
4. Philosophical apprehension of life

3. “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night, God said Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Pope’s couplet captures:

1. Newton’s confirmation of the Genesis passage
2. Newton’s empirical observations of Principia Mathematica
3. Newton’s principles of motion
4. Newton’s discovery that all colors are contained in white light

4. Pope’s An Essay on Man is based on the ideas of:

1. Lord Petrie
2. Theobald
3. Lord Bolingbroke
4. Lord Harvey

5. Which ancient critics does Alexander Pope commend as exemplary in Essay on Criticism?

1. Aristotle, Quintilian, Dryden, Dionysius, Horace
2. Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Durfey, Dryden
3. Aristotle, Horace, Dionysius, Quintilian, Longinus
4. Aristotle, Horace, Durfey, Quintilian, Longinus

6. Which of these lines is NOT in Pope’s Essay on Criticism?

1. “Wretches hang that jury men may dine”
2. “A little learning is a dangerous thing”
3. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”
4. “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”

7. Put the following books of Pope in a sequence of publication:

1. (ii), (iii), (i), (iv)
2. (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
3. (iv), (ii), (i), (iii)
4. (ii), (i), (iv), (iii)

8. Which of the following works is not actually a prose essay?

1. Essay of Dramatic Poesy
2. Essay on Man
3. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
4. An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision

9. In the lines “With gold jewels cover every part, / And hide with ornaments their want of art” (Essay on Criticism), Pope rejects:

1. The ‘Follow Nature’ fallacy
2. Artificiality
3. Aesthetic order
4. Poor taste

10. The four Moral Essays of Alexander Pope are addressed to carefully selected figures. Identify:

1. Timons, Newton, Martha Blount, Wellington
2. Lord Cobham, Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, Chandos
3. Martha Blount, Lord Cobham, Bathurst, Burlington
4. William III, John Haydn, Joseph Addison, John Dennis

11. Alexander Pope in the Essay on Criticism deals with:

1. The merits and limitations of the 18th century school of poetry
2. The merits and limitations of the 18th century school of drama
3. The merits and limitations of the 18th century school of criticism
4. The merits and limitations of the 18th century school of prose

12. Who of the following translated Homer’s Iliad?

1. Alexander Pope
2. William Congreve
3. John Donne
4. George Herbert

13. “Be Homer’s works your study and delight. / Read them by day, and meditate by night.” — Who gives this advice to the poets?

1. Sidney
2. Dryden
3. Pope
4. Ben Jonson

14. Name the author of Essay on Criticism.

1. Pope
2. Dryden
3. Swift
4. John Gay

15. Dr. Johnson’s The Lives of The Poets is an example of:

1. Psychological criticism
2. Biographical criticism
3. Historical criticism
4. Archetypal criticism

16. Which of the following is not a work by Dr. Johnson:

1. Preface to the English Dictionary
2. Preface to Shakespeare
3. Lives of English Poets
4. Cowley

17. The most obvious feature of Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets is the equipoise between:

1. Language and form
2. Style and content
3. Biography and criticism
4. Myth and archetype

18. Assertion (A): Dr Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets does not carry a life of William Wordsworth. Reason (R): Dr Johnson singled out poets whom he adored, which explains his omission of Wordsworth.

1. (A) is wrong but (R) is correct
2. (A) is true but (R) is false
3. (A) and (R) are true
4. Neither (A) nor (R) is true

19. What is the following a description of? ‘A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece’

1. Essay
2. Autobiography
3. Epistolary Fiction
4. Diary

20. Virginia Woolf borrowed the idea of the ‘common reader’ from Dr. Johnson. To which particular work does she remain indebted?

1. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; the essay on Milton
2. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; the essay on Gray
3. Preface to Shakespeare
4. The Patriot

21. Which character finds that complete happiness is elusive and that “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live”?

1. Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa
2. Rasselas in Johnson’s Rasselas
3. Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker
4. Harley in Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

22. Which work by Johnson is an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal?

1. London
2. Vanity of Human Wishes
3. The Life of Savage
4. Rasselas

23. “Nothing odd will do long. ______ did not last long.” Dr. Johnson had this to say about which novel?

1. Tom Jones
2. The Female Quixote
3. Tristram Shandy
4. Clarissa

24. What is Johnson’s opinion regarding the “Violation” of the three unities in Shakespeare’s plays?

The correct combination is:

1. I and II are correct
2. II and IV are correct
3. III and IV are correct
4. I and III are correct

25. “I suffered from impaired eye-sight, depression and poverty and left Oxford without a degree…” Identify the writer, the magazine and the journal.

1. John Milton, The Examiner’s Magazine, London Magazine
2. Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, The Tatler
3. Richard Steele, The Guardian, The Spectator
4. Samuel Johnson, The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Rambler

26. “Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief” was Samuel Johnson’s criticism of which poem?

1. P.B. Shelley’s “Adonais”
2. Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella”
3. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
4. John Milton’s “Lycidas”

27. With whom was Dr. Johnson intimately associated in his personal life?

1. Boswell
2. Dryden
3. Alexander Pope
4. Lord Bolingbroke

28. Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” expresses:

1. Epicureanism
2. Humanism
3. Stoicism
4. Cynicism

29. “He found it [English] brick and left it marble”, remarked one great writer on another. Who were they?

1. Milton on Shakespeare
2. Dryden on Milton
3. Johnson on Dryden
4. Jonson on Shakespeare

30. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of Poets (1781) was originally a series of introductions to the poets he wrote for a group of London publishers. They were collected as:

1. Lives of English Poets: Critical and Biographical Essays.
2. Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of English Poets.
3. Notes, Biographical and Critical, on the Works of English Poets.
4. Lives of English Poets: Biographical and Critical Notes.

31. Samuel Johnson’s use of the term “metaphysical” in a piece of criticism was:

1. Approving
2. Disapproving
3. Positive
4. Accidental

32. Which of the Aristotelian dramatic unities does Johnson believe Shakespeare observes most successfully?

1. Time
2. Place
3. Action
4. Johnson does not feel that the Aristotelian dramatic unities are important

33. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets combines the following EXCEPT:

1. Analytical criticism
2. Literary history
3. Personal biography
4. Socratic dialogue

34. In the biography of which poet in his Lives of Poets did Johnson make his famous remark about “metaphysical poets”?

1. John Dryden
2. Thomas Parnell
3. Abraham Cowley
4. Alexander Pope

35. Samuel Johnson criticises an English poet: “These images are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments… His art and his struggle are too visible.” Identify the poet.

1. Thomas Gray
2. John Dryden
3. John Milton
4. Thomas Wyatt

36. Identify the two correct statements in Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare:

1. (a) and (b)
2. (a) and (c)
3. (c) and (d)
4. (b) and (d)

37. Who said of blank verse, quoting an unnamed critic, that it is “verse only to the eye”, adding it “has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers”?

1. John Dryden
2. Alexander Pope
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
4. Samuel Johnson

38. Shakespeare, according to Johnson offers:

1. Particular manners peculiar to individuals
2. Particular manners peculiar to time
3. Particular manners peculiar to place
4. Representation of general nature

39. Who made the following statement: “The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns and the beauties of the ancients”?

1. Matthew Arnold
2. Samuel Johnson
3. T.S. Eliot
4. Thomas Carlyle

40. “The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” Whose view is this?

1. Wordsworth’s
2. Coleridge’s
3. Dr. Johnson’s
4. Matthew Arnold’s

41. Regarding the observance of the three Classical Unities in a play, Dr. Johnson’s view is that:

1. Only the unity of Time should be observed
2. Only the unity of Place should be observed
3. Only the unity of Action should be observed
4. All the three unities should be observed

42. Who was the author of Lives of the Poets?

1. T. S. Eliot
2. William Empson
3. Philip Sidney
4. Dr. Samuel Johnson

43. “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.” Who says this?

1. Dr. Johnson
2. Ben Jonson
3. John Milton
4. William Wordsworth

44. Dr. Johnson showed his distrust towards:

1. Reason and truth
2. Taste and beauty
3. Nature and test of time
4. None of these

45. Johnson defended Shakespeare’s use of:

1. Comedy
2. Tragedy
3. Tragi-comedy
4. None of these

46. Lives of the Poets gives us biographical and critical studies of how many poets?

1. 94 poets
2. 52 poets
3. 102 poets
4. 56 poets

47. Who claimed: “I have not published a single paper that is not written in a spirit of benevolence and with a love of mankind”?

1. Pope
2. Dryden
3. Swift
4. Addison

48. “The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought.” Whose view is this?

1. Dr. Johnson
2. Joseph Addison
3. John Dryden
4. Alexander Pope

49. Which of the following critics preferred Shakespeare’s Comedies to his Tragedies?

1. Pope
2. Dryden
3. Dr. Johnson
4. None of these

50. Edmund Burke’s challenge to Neoclassical tenets of form and reason was titled:

1. An Enquiry into the Philosophical Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
2. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
3. An Enquiry into the Philosophical Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime
4. Philosophical Enquiry into Our Original Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime

51. Poetic Diction was taken to be the standard language for poetry in which age?

1. The Neo-classical Age
2. The Victorian Age
3. The Elizabethan Age
4. The Romantic Age

52. Anti-sentimental comedy is a criticism of:

1. Loss of moral purpose
2. Excess of emotion
3. Excess of reason
4. Loss of human feelings