Renaissance to Romantic Criticism — GK Questions with Answers

1. Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie was written in reply to —
   1. Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry
   2. Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse
   3. Plato’s Republic
   4. Jonson’s Timber
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   Answer: (B) Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse

   Gosson dedicated his Puritan attack to Sidney, who answered it.

2. "The poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth" is Sidney’s answer to the charge that poetry —
   1. wastes time
   2. is the mother of lies
   3. corrupts morals
   4. is unlearned
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   Answer: (B) is the mother of lies

   The poet never claims his tale is fact, so he cannot be accused of lying.

3. Who called Dryden "the father of English criticism"?
   1. Pope
   2. Dr Johnson
   3. Coleridge
   4. Arnold
   Show answer

   Answer: (B) Dr Johnson

   Dr Johnson gave him the title in the Lives of the Poets.

4. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden himself is represented by —
   1. Crites
   2. Eugenius
   3. Lisideius
   4. Neander
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   Answer: (D) Neander

   Neander, meaning "new man", speaks for Dryden and defends the English drama.

5. Which speaker in Dryden’s Essay defends the Ancients?
   1. Crites
   2. Eugenius
   3. Lisideius
   4. Neander
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   Answer: (A) Crites

   Crites argues for the Greeks and Romans; Eugenius for the Moderns.

6. "Here is God’s plenty" was Dryden’s comment on —
   1. Shakespeare
   2. Jonson
   3. Chaucer
   4. Milton
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   Answer: (C) Chaucer

   From the Preface to the Fables (1700), on Chaucer.

7. "A little learning is a dangerous thing" is from —
   1. An Essay on Man
   2. An Essay on Criticism
   3. The Dunciad
   4. The Rape of the Lock
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   Answer: (B) An Essay on Criticism

   All the famous critical lines come from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711).

8. Pope’s phrase "Nature methodised" refers to —
   1. the laws of science
   2. the rules of the ancients
   3. the English countryside
   4. the human mind
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   Answer: (B) the rules of the ancients

   The ancient rules were "discovered, not devised" — they are Nature put in order.

9. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language appeared in —
   1. 1745
   2. 1755
   3. 1765
   4. 1775
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   Answer: (B) 1755

   1755. The Preface to Shakespeare came ten years later, in 1765.

10. Johnson defends Shakespeare’s breach of the unities of time and place by arguing that —
    1. the unities were never Aristotle’s
    2. the spectators are always in their senses
    3. Shakespeare was unlearned
    4. the French also break them
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    Answer: (B) the spectators are always in their senses

    The audience knows it is in a theatre, so the illusion is never really broken.

11. The term "Metaphysical poets" was fixed in criticism by —
    1. Dryden
    2. Dr Johnson
    3. T. S. Eliot
    4. Coleridge
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    Answer: (B) Dr Johnson

    Johnson in the Life of Cowley, taking a hint from Dryden’s remark that Donne "affects the metaphysics".

12. "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together" describes —
    1. Romantic poetry
    2. Metaphysical poetry
    3. Augustan satire
    4. Miltonic epic
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    Answer: (B) Metaphysical poetry

    Johnson’s famous verdict on the Metaphysicals in the Life of Cowley.

13. "Discordia concors" means —
    1. harmony of similar things
    2. a combination of dissimilar images
    3. disagreement among critics
    4. the unity of action
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    Answer: (B) a combination of dissimilar images

    Johnson’s definition of metaphysical wit — resemblances found in things apparently unlike.

14. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads was added in —
    1. 1798
    2. 1800
    3. 1802
    4. 1817
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    Answer: (B) 1800

    The volume appeared in 1798; the Preface was added to the second edition in 1800.

15. Wordsworth describes the poet as —
    1. a nightingale singing in darkness
    2. a man speaking to men
    3. the unacknowledged legislator
    4. a chameleon
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    Answer: (B) a man speaking to men

    "A man speaking to men" — differing from others in degree, not in kind.

16. Complete: poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from —
    1. imagination working on nature
    2. emotion recollected in tranquillity
    3. the real language of men
    4. incidents of common life
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    Answer: (B) emotion recollected in tranquillity

    The two halves of the definition always go together.

17. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge disagrees with Wordsworth chiefly about —
    1. the role of feeling
    2. the language of poetry
    3. the value of nature
    4. the use of metre in prose
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    Answer: (B) the language of poetry

    Coleridge denies that there is no essential difference between the language of prose and verse.

18. Coleridge’s coined word for the shaping power of imagination is —
    1. esemplastic
    2. organic
    3. protean
    4. plastic
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    Answer: (A) esemplastic

    Esemplastic — "to shape into one".

19. "That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" was written by —
    1. Wordsworth
    2. Coleridge
    3. Keats
    4. Shelley
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    Answer: (B) Coleridge

    It is Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, chapter XIV.

20. In the plan of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge was to write about —
    1. humble and rustic life
    2. supernatural subjects
    3. political subjects
    4. classical myth
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    Answer: (B) supernatural subjects

    Coleridge took the supernatural; Wordsworth took the everyday.

21. "Negative capability" was coined by —
    1. Wordsworth
    2. Coleridge
    3. Keats
    4. Hazlitt
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    Answer: (C) Keats

    Keats, in a letter of December 1817; he finds it supremely in Shakespeare.

22. Keats applied the phrase "egotistical sublime" to —
    1. Milton
    2. Wordsworth
    3. Byron
    4. Coleridge
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    Answer: (B) Wordsworth

    It is Keats’s criticism of Wordsworth, whose personality fills his poetry.

23. Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry was written as a reply to —
    1. Gosson
    2. Peacock
    3. Jeffrey
    4. Southey
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    Answer: (B) Peacock

    To Thomas Love Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry (1820).

24. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" closes —
    1. the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
    2. A Defence of Poetry
    3. Biographia Literaria
    4. An Apologie for Poetrie
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    Answer: (B) A Defence of Poetry

    It is the last sentence of Shelley’s Defence.

25. The distinction between the "literature of knowledge" and the "literature of power" was made by —
    1. Hazlitt
    2. Lamb
    3. De Quincey
    4. Leigh Hunt
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    Answer: (C) De Quincey

    Thomas De Quincey — the first teaches, the second moves.

26. Arrange chronologically: (i) Biographia Literaria (ii) Essay of Dramatic Poesy (iii) Apologie for Poetrie (iv) Preface to Shakespeare
    1. iii, ii, iv, i
    2. ii, iii, i, iv
    3. iii, iv, ii, i
    4. ii, iv, iii, i
    Show answer

    Answer: (A) iii, ii, iv, i

    1595 → 1668 → 1765 → 1817.

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