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UNIT 2 – POETRY (UGC NET ENGLISH)
Previous Year Questions with Answers & Explanations**
1. How many legends of good women could Chaucer complete in The Legend of Good Women?
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(A) Six
(B) Seven
(C) Eight
(D) Nine
✔ Answer: (C) Eight
✔ Explanation:
Chaucer planned a longer series but completed only eight legends, including Cleopatra, Dido, Thisbe, and others. The work is an early example of female-centered narrative in English poetry.
2. Dylan Thomas is associated with which literary group?
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(A) The New Apocalypse
(B) The Black Arts
(C) The Movement
(D) Deep Image Poetry
✔ Answer: (A) The New Apocalypse
✔ Explanation:
Dylan Thomas’s surreal images, emotional intensity, and visionary style align with the New Apocalypse movement, a 1940s reaction against rationalism and classicism.
**3. “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power … awaits alike the inevitable hour …”
What is the subject of awaits?**
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(A) Hour
(B) The things mentioned in the first two lines
(C) “And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave”
(D) Grave
✔ Answer: (B)
✔ Explanation:
In Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, “the things mentioned in the first two lines” — heraldry, power, beauty, wealth — all “await” the inevitable hour of death.
4. Which fact is NOT true of Edmund Spenser?
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(A) He is a kind of English Homer.
(B) He invented the Spenserian stanza.
(C) He opposed England’s break with the Church of Rome.
(D) He is a Christian poet.
✔ Answer: (C)
✔ Explanation:
Spenser supported Protestant policies in Ireland and did NOT oppose England’s break with Rome. The other statements are accurate.
5. How did Chaucer’s Pardoner make his living?
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(A) Selling stolen cattle
(B) Selling indulgences
(C) Pardoning criminals
(D) Assisting the Friar
✔ Answer: (B)
✔ Explanation:
In The Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner profits by selling fake religious indulgences, one of Chaucer’s strongest criticisms of Church corruption.
6. Coleridge’s companion in the Utopian “Pantisocracy” scheme was—
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(A) Lord Byron
(B) Robert Southey
(C) William Hazlitt
(D) William Wordsworth
✔ Answer: (B)
✔ Explanation:
Coleridge and Southey dreamed of establishing an ideal society on the Susquehanna River—one of the Romantic movement’s early radical visions.
7. Who wrote a poem comparing a lover’s heart to a hand grenade?
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(A) John Donne
(B) Abraham Cowley
(C) Wilfred Owen
(D) Robert Graves
✔ Answer: (D) Robert Graves
✔ Explanation:
Robert Graves’s wartime lyric imagery often fuses love and violence; the hand-grenade metaphor appears in his poem “A Lover’s Quarrel.”
8. “Jabberwocky” is a creation in—
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(A) Edward Lear’s poetry
(B) Lewis Carroll’s work
(C) Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit
(D) Hardy’s Woodlanders
✔ Answer: (B)
✔ Explanation:
“Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking-Glass, is Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem, full of invented words like galumphing.
9. The Emblem as a poetic genre was popularised in 1635 by—
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(A) Robert Southwell
(B) Francis Quarles
(C) John Davies
(D) Joseph Sylvester
✔ Answer: (B)
✔ Explanation:
Francis Quarles’s Emblems helped institutionalize the emblematic poem, combining symbolic images with moral verses.
**10. In which poem does Matthew Arnold write:
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead …”?**
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(1) “Self-Dependence”
(2) “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”
(3) “To a Republican Friend”
(4) “Dover Beach”
✔ Answer: (2) “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”
✔ Explanation:
Arnold expresses the Victorian crisis of faith, suspended between a dying past and an uncertain future.
11. Samuel Johnson condemned “metaphysical poets” in whose biography?
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(1) John Dryden
(2) Thomas Parnell
(3) Abraham Cowley
(4) Alexander Pope
✔ Answer: (3) Abraham Cowley
✔ Explanation:
Johnson used the term “metaphysical poets” disparagingly in his Life of Cowley, initiating the modern labeling of Donne & followers.
**12. Which Byron work begins:
“I want a hero: an uncommon want …”?**
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(1) Beppo
(2) Cain
(3) Manfred
(4) Don Juan
✔ Answer: (4) Don Juan
✔ Explanation:
Don Juan opens with this ironic invocation, mocking heroic conventions.
13. Emily Dickinson’s “open form” resembles which American poet?
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(1) Anne Bradstreet
(2) Robert Lowell
(3) Walt Whitman
(4) Sylvia Plath
✔ Answer: (3) Walt Whitman
✔ Explanation:
Both Dickinson and Whitman revolutionized American poetry through free verse, unconventional punctuation, and rejection of strict meter.
14. William Blake was influenced by which writers?
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Choices included Luther, Boehme, Swedenborg, Confucius.
✔ Correct Answer: (3) Boehme and Swedenborg
✔ Explanation:
Blake drew heavily on mystical Christianity and visionary theology, especially from Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.
15. In “Whispers of Immortality,” T. S. Eliot refers to which metaphysical poet pair?
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(partial snippet shows question header)
✔ Answer: John Donne and John Webster
(Full text in file shows Eliot contrasting Donne’s vitality and Webster’s morbidity.)
✔ Explanation:
Eliot uses the two poets to comment on intensity, death, and spiritual exhaustion in the modern world.
16. According to Sidney, which is the “best kind of poetry”?
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(1) Heroic / Epic
(2) Lyric
(3) Pastoral
(4) Elegiac
✔ Answer: (1) Heroical / Epic poetry
✔ Explanation:
Sidney praises epic poetry for presenting ideal virtue in action, making it most instructive and noble.
17. Which writers popularized the Round Table essays?
(Not poetry per se but in syllabus boundary; CIVIL criticism)
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(A) Lamb & Hazlitt
(B) Lamb & Hunt
(C) Hazlitt & Hunt
(D) Hazlitt & De Quincey
✔ Answer: (C)
✔ Explanation:
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt collaborated on The Round Table essays.
18. Which poets represent Queen Elizabeth in Spenser’s Faerie Queene?
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I Britomart
II Cynthia
III Belphoebe
IV Faerie Queene
✔ Correct Answer: (1) Belphoebe & Faerie Queene
✔ Explanation:
Spenser idealizes Elizabeth I as both a warrior-maiden and a divine queen.
19. Which lines are repeated in Mrs Dalloway?
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✔ Answer: (2)
“Fear no more the heat of the sun…”
✔ Explanation:
Clarissa recalls this line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, symbolizing mortality.