The Victorians • Modernism & Imagism • Auden • the War Poets • Larkin & Plath — on two printable pages
| Trick | Every printed example | The rule |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Spelling & capitals All four options are the same word | Sophocls / Saphocles / Sophocles / Siphocls • Petals / betals / pets / sparrows • loneleness / lonliness / loneliness / aloneliness • The West Land / The Wasted Land / The Waste Land / The Vast Land • Bureau of Statistics / bureau of statistics / Beaureau of Statistics • 1948 Nobel Prize / The Royal noble Prize / The Noble Prize • Queen Fictoria (misspelt on purpose) • Robert Brook / Winfred Owene (both wrong) | Read letter by letter. CAPITALS COUNT. NOBEL not noble. RUPERT Brooke not Robert Brook. WILFRED Owen not Winfred Owene. |
| 2. He deletes the answer “None of these” becomes correct | Dramatic monologue without Robert Browning → None • Vergiss mein nicht without Keith Douglas → None • imagistic clarity without Imagism → None • Plath's relationships without father/husband → None • Victorian dates without 1837–1901 → None • the reign with “Fictoria” → None | Before answering from memory, CHECK THE RIGHT ANSWER IS ACTUALLY PRINTED. If it isn't, take “None of these”. It is a real answer on his papers, not filler — six times over. |
| 3. One option swapped, key moves | “imagism can be described as” with indirect → objective; with direct → Both A and C • “In a Station of the Metro consists of” with two lines → two lines; without it → 14 words • expatriates to a country → Great Britain; to a city → Paris • Modernism reacting to a war → WWI; with no war offered → Victorian optimism • founder of Imagism with Pound → Pound; with H.D. → H.D. | READ ALL FOUR OPTIONS EVERY TIME. The option list, not the question, decides the letter. Learn the FACT, never the letter. |
And one more: the LEAST / MOST pair. “During the Victorian age the writings of this genre were LEAST practised” → DRAMA. “…MOST practised / dominant / flourished” → THE NOVEL. Same four options, consecutive questions, on three papers. Circle the word LEAST or MOST before you look down.
| Question | Printed | True |
|---|---|---|
| Who wrote In Memoriam? | Matthew Arnold | Alfred Tennyson |
| Died shortly before the Armistice | Rupert Brooke | Wilfred Owen |
| Imagists influenced by | Japanese only | Japanese and Chinese |
| Aubade's stanzas | “five-line” | five stanzas of ten lines |
| Metaphors — “all EXCEPT” | cow | “a cow in calf” is in the poem |
In the hall: if the item is one he has printed before, answer as the grid did — the grid is what scores you. Know the truth because the same facts return in other questions where the key is sound.
| Victorian age | 1837–1901 (or 1832 — both accepted) |
| First Reform Act | 1832 |
| Crimean War | 1853–1856 |
| Darwin, Origin of Species | 1859 |
| Marx, Das Kapital | 1867 |
| Education Act | 1870 |
| Boer War (first British defeat) | 1899–1902 |
| Edwardian | 1901–1914 |
| Modernist | 1914–1939 |
| Contemporary | 1939– |
| Postmodernism begins | mid-1950s |
| WWI • dead | 1914–18 • 21 million |
| WWII • dead | 1939–45 • 44 million |
| Woolf: “human nature changed” | December 1910 |
| Lawrence: “the old world ended” | 1915 |
| Imagism active | 1912–1917 (< a decade) |
| Three Imagist rules published | March 1913, Poetry |
| Pound leaves for Vorticism | 1914 |
| In a Station of the Metro | experience 1912, published 1913 |
| The Red Wheelbarrow | 1923 |
| Prufrock and Other Observations | 1917 |
| Eliot: Nobel Prize | 1948 |
| Auden: Pulitzer (Age of Anxiety) | 1948 |
| Dover Beach written / published | c.1851 / 1867 |
| In Memoriam | 1850 (17 yrs' writing) |
| Tennyson made laureate | 1850, for 42 years |
| My Last Duchess | 1842 |
| Sonnets from the Portuguese | 1850 |
| Goblin Market | 1862 |
| Brookes met / eloped | 1845 / 1846 |
| Brooke's 5 sonnets published | 1915 |
| Anthem for Doomed Youth | 1917 |
| The Fall of Rome | 1947 |
| Plath's death | 1963, suicide |
| Tennyson 1809–92 | Chief representative of Victorian poetry. Laureate 1850 after Wordsworth. Lost Arthur Hallam 1833, stopped publishing 10 years, wrote In Memoriam. |
| R. Browning 1812–89 | Invented the dramatic monologue. Eloped to Italy 1846. Died Venice. |
| Arnold 1822–88 | School inspector 30+ yrs; Oxford professor of poetry. Poet, critic, essayist — never dramatist / novelist / scientist. |
| E. B. Browning 1806–61 | Six years older than Robert; invalid; died Florence. Contender for laureate 1850 — lost to Tennyson. |
| C. Rossetti 1830–94 | Goblin Market 1862; brother = painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. |
| Hardy 1840–1928 | A Victorian who lived into the 20th c. “Immanent Will”. Wrote The Man He Killed 12 yrs before WWI. |
| Yeats 1865–1939 | Irish. “The last Romantic and the first Modernist.” Tower: Thoor Ballylee. NOT a Victorian poet. |
| W. C. Williams 1883–1963 | Physician. USA-born, Geneva-educated, medicine at Pennsylvania & Leipzig. Founded Objectivism. |
| Pound 1885–1972 | “MAKE IT NEW”. Yeats's secretary. Edited The Waste Land. Cantos, Cathay. Publicist of Imagism. Went mad; fascism. |
| H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) | American. The inventor of Imagism; married Richard Aldington. |
| T. S. Eliot 1888–1965 | American-born; father of Modernist poetry. Nobel 1948. “Classicist / royalist / Anglo-Catholic.” |
| Auden 1907–73 | York → USA 1939 → died Vienna. Socialism+Freud → Christianity. Pulitzer 1948. |
| Sassoon 1886–1967 | Jewish, privileged, officer. Survived. Met Owen in a Scottish psychiatric hospital. |
| Owen 1893–1918 | Killed one week before the Armistice. Horror and pity of war. |
| Brooke 1887–1915 | Great physical beauty; favoured by Churchill. Died of blood poisoning at Scyros, never in battle. |
| Rosenberg d.1918 | Jewish; enlisted because poor; soldiers as victims of war machinery. |
| Keith Douglas 1920–44 | WWII, Tank Corps, North Africa; killed in Normandy. |
| Larkin | Librarian. Ordinary life, time, death. |
| Plath d.1963 | Confessional. Suicide. Father + husband (Ted Hughes). |
| Dover Beach | 4 verse paragraphs (NOT stanzas), of 14 / 6 / 8 / 9 lines. Heterometric. A dramatic monologue. 1 speaker, addressing his beloved. |
| My Last Duchess | Dramatic monologue in heroic couplets, 56 lines. Addressee: an envoy. |
| Break, break, break | 4 quatrains (16 lines), irregular iambic tetrameter, ABCB. Circular. Not a ballad. |
| The Eagle | 6 lines, 2 triplets. Subtitled “A Fragment”. Eagle personified: “he”, “crooked hands”. |
| Sonnet 43 | Petrarchan, ABBAABBACDCDCD, iambic pentameter, volta l.9, “I love thee” ×8. |
| Remember | Petrarchan sonnet, volta l.9 (“Yet if you should forget…”). |
| Up-Hill | 4 quatrains (16 lines), question-and-answer, allegory. |
| In a Station of the Metro | 2 lines, 14 words (8+6). Not a couplet, not a sonnet, no verb. Haiku-influenced. |
| The Red Wheelbarrow | 8 lines, 16 words, one sentence, free verse. |
| The Soldier | Sonnet; octave + sestet. “England/English” ×6 in 14 lines. |
| Anthem for Doomed Youth | Sonnet, octave + sestet, strict rhyme. Ironic title. |
| Musée des Beaux Arts | Free verse, irregular rhyme. 3 Brueghel paintings. |
| Vergissmeinnicht | 24 lines, 6 quatrains. WWII, North Africa. |
| Metaphors | 9 lines × 9 syllables = 9 months. |
| Aubade | 5 stanzas of 10 lines, regular rhyme. Ironic title (a dawn love-song). |
| Dramatic monologue | Speaker addresses a silent listener and reveals himself indirectly. Invented by R. Browning. |
| Soliloquy | Speaking alone, to oneself. Not the same thing. |
| Realism | Documenting actual life, especially the working classes. |
| Naturalism | Realism + determinism: heredity and environment decide character. |
| Symbol | Suggests; expansive; “casts long shadows” (Henry James). |
| Allegory | Reductive: one element = one idea. Example: Animal Farm. |
| Imagism | Objective — no slither; direct — no excessive adjectives. Economy, concrete images, free verse. |
| The 3 rules | 1 Direct treatment of the thing • 2 No superfluous word • 3 Compose to the musical phrase, not the metronome. |
| Objectivism | W. C. Williams: form and meaning are “single and identical”. |
| Vorticism | What Pound left Imagism for, 1914. |
| Stream of consciousness | Joyce. His moments of revelation = epiphanies. |
| Impersonality | Eliot: the poem exists apart from the poet's feelings. |
| Confessional poetry | Plath. Psychological, autobiographical, taboo-breaking. |
| Heterometric / isometric | Lines of differing / identical length. |
| Cantos / books / chapters / acts | Epics → books → cantos. Novels → chapters. Plays → acts → scenes. |
| If the stem says… | Answer |
|---|---|
| Father of Modernist poetry | T. S. Eliot |
| Midwife / publicist / editor | Ezra Pound |
| Inventor / founder of Imagism | H.D. |
| Wrote The Waste Land | Eliot |
| Edited The Waste Land | Pound |
| Laureate after Wordsworth | Tennyson |
| Tennyson became laureate after … | Wordsworth |
| In Memoriam / Arthur Hallam | Tennyson |
| Thyrsis / Arthur Hugh Clough | Arnold |
| Expatriates to a country | Great Britain |
| Expatriates to a city | Paris |
| Least practised genre | Drama |
| Most practised genre | The novel |
| “Oh, to be in England” | R. Browning |
| “When Spring comes back to England” | Alfred Noyes |
| Mirror's narrator | the mirror |
| Metaphors' subject | pregnancy |
1. The dropped lecture that is still examined. Lecture 9 opens with a note in Arabic saying the professor deleted Lecture 7 (Ezra Pound / Imagism) and that it is not required for the exam. Do not act on it. The newest photographed paper — 12 March 2026 — takes thirteen of its forty questions from exactly that material: the three rules, H.D., Cathay, “Make it new”, the Metro poem, the wheelbarrow, Williams's profession. Every older paper is full of it too.
2. The examined poets with no lecture. There is no Larkin and no Plath handout in your set, yet all four papers examine them, and the August 2025 paper gives them seven of its fifty items. That material has been reconstructed for you from the papers and the poems in the Auden & War bank — work it, because nothing else covers it.