Power Up: Focus on American Poetry
Diagnostic Pretest
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1. The line “and miles to go before I sleep” is repeated at the end of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem by what author? answer: ______________________________________ 2. What “Fireside Poet” wrote the long work The Song of Hiawatha, inspired by Native American mythology? answer: ______________________________________ 3. Colonial poet Anne Bradstreetʹs major collection is titled for what figure “lately sprung up in America”? answer: ______________________________________ 4. On what large work of art is Emma Lazarusʹs poem “The New Colossus” inscribed? answer: ______________________________________ 5. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen were members of what largely African‐American literary and cultural movement of the early 20th century? answer: ______________________________________ 6. What long poem, which begins ”I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” was written by Allen Ginsberg, a member of the “Beat Generation”? answer: ______________________________________ 7. What female poet wrote the collection Ariel and the poem “Daddy”? answer: ______________________________________ 8. What poet praised the “City of the Big Shoulders” in his poem “Chicago”? answer: ______________________________________ 9. “April is the cruellest month” is the first line of what long poem by T. S. Eliot? answer: ______________________________________ 10. Emily Dickinson was known as the “Belle” of what Massachusetts town, where she spent most of her adult life as a recluse in her family home? answer: ______________________________________ 11. What poet described sounding his “barbaric yawp” in his poem “Song of Myself”? answer: ______________________________________ 12. What 19th‐century American poet wrote “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl”? answer: ______________________________________ 13. What poetʹs unusual punctuation and capitalization are on display in “anyone lived in a pretty how town”? answer: ______________________________________ 14. What man wrote of a creature that repeats the word “nevermore” in his poem “The Raven”? answer: ______________________________________ 15. The two‐line poem “In a Station of the Metro” was written by what Modernist and Imagist poet, who also wrote the Cantos? answer: ______________________________________ 16. Robert Lowell wrote a poem set in Boston titled for the “dead” of an army that fought what war? answer: ______________________________________ 17. Poet Joyce Kilmer wrote “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as” what natural object? answer: ______________________________________ 18. William Carlos Williams wrote that “so much depends upon” what object, which is “beside the white chickens”? answer: ______________________________________ 19. What 20th‐century poet wrote the collection Harmonium, which contains “Sunday Morning” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream”? answer: ______________________________________ 20. What African‐American poet from Chicago wrote the poem “We Real Cool”? answer: ______________________________________