Mock 1 – American Literature: Poetry

The opening of Emily Dickinson's poem (no. 112 Franklin; pub. 1864): only the defeated truly understand victory.

Hughes answers Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing': the 'darker brother' sent to eat in the kitchen insists he too is America.

Crepusculario (1923) → Twenty Love Poems (1924) → Venture of the Infinite Man (1926) → The Inhabitant and His Hope (1926) → España en el corazón (1937), on the Spanish Civil War.

Williams (1955): the dying plantation patriarch, father of Brick.

Rita Dove (1993–95), then the youngest to hold the post. Robert Hayden had been Consultant in Poetry (1976–78) before the title of Poet Laureate was added.

Note: Robert Hayden was the first African American Consultant in Poetry; Dove was the first under the Poet Laureate title.

Clifton, quilting (1991).

We Are Going (1964). Unaipon's Native Legends (1929) is prose, Night Cries is a film, and Caprice a novel.

Emerson, Nature (1836), ch. VI 'Idealism'.

Locke edited The New Negro (1925); Hughes and Hurston were central figures. Jamison and King are contemporary writers.

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1937; Hughes, Hurston, McKay, Cullen) belongs to the twentieth century. Harlem was a white neighbourhood that became the Black capital during the Great Migration, not the reverse.

Streetcar (1947) is set in the French Quarter of New Orleans and ends with Blanche led off to an asylum. Blanche has lost the family estate, Belle Reve; Tom Wingfield and Laura belong to The Glass Menagerie, and Stella is Blanche's sister.

It appeared as 'A Child's Reminiscence' in the Saturday Press (24 December 1859) and as 'A Word Out of the Sea' in Leaves of Grass (1860). It took its present title in 1871 and settled in 'Sea-Drift' in 1881.

'Skunk Hour' (Life Studies, 1959) and 'Night Sweat' (For the Union Dead, 1964) are Lowell's confessional poems. The others are by Stevens, Ginsberg and Frost.

'The Applicant' (1962, Ariel) is Sylvia Plath's and 'Ripples on the Surface' (No Nature, 1992) is Gary Snyder's. Rich wrote 'Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law' (1963), 'Diving into the Wreck' (1973) and 'Transcendental Etude' (1977).

Note: The source misprints item A as 'Driving into the Wreck'.

Saki's Reginald in Russia (1910) followed Reginald (1904); he had been the Morning Post's correspondent in Russia.

Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) published We Are Going (1964), the first book of poetry by an Aboriginal Australian. Judith Wright was a white Australian ally.

Rich's 'Aunt Jennifer's Tigers' (A Change of World, 1951): the tigers she embroiders prance free while her hands are weighed down by 'the massive weight of Uncle's wedding band'.

Dickinson's poem 712 (Johnson numbering); Oodgeroo's title poem (1964); Wright's 'Woman to Man' (1949); Komunyakaa's 'Banking Potatoes'.

Whitman's Civil War poem (Drum-Taps, 1865); Hope's 'Australia' ('a Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey'); Walcott's 'A Far Cry from Africa' (1956); Ginsberg's 'Howl' (1956).

Walcott's 'Goats and Monkeys' (The Castaway, 1965) takes its title and epigraph from Iago's 'an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe'.

Maugham's story (Creatures of Circumstance, 1947); Waugh's story (1933), later the ending of A Handful of Dust; Irving (The Sketch Book, 1819); Crane (1898).

Note: Options 2 and 4 are misprinted in the source (numbers repeated); normalised here.

Frost (1916); Neruda's Poem 20 (1924); Whitman (1860); Hughes's reply to Whitman (1926).

Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal); Heine (Buch der Lieder); Plath (Ariel); the Cuban Martí (Versos sencillos).

'Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God' — so the self-reliant man leaves 'Chance' behind (1841).

Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962): John Shade's poem, annotated by the deluded Charles Kinbote.