In my time as a college literature instructor, I leaned heavily on the works of a former literature teacher who greatly impressed me with his knowledge, but also his tests. To his credit, from Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ, the late, great Bill Watkins.
This is from the Early American literature class I took @1996 or so. I had the best time ever. I turned Bill's tests into my own format later on:
English 251 in-class final exam / Mr. Lopate
1. A mixture of opium and alcohol found in a Baltimore poet and 19th-century medicine:
2. Those whom God chose (in their view) to be saved when the world ended and who are supposed to carry out His cosmic plan on earth by setting a good example of a proper life. Also known as the Body of Visible Saints:
3. Reference to Greek or Latin literature or mythology as a source of comparison or authority. For example, referring to the sun as a “Phoebus chariot”:
His discovery that his illustrious grandfather (one of the judges in the Salem witch trials) had, in fact, put innocent people to death, inspired him to write ambiguous fiction about hidden guilt and the nature of evil:
5. America’s second internationally known poet, who wrote in English as her second language and rose above the handicaps of being a slave and a woman in the 18th century:
6. Fire & brimstone Puritan preacher who set off the largest religious revival in American history with his terrifying sermons:
7. A recluse who seldom went out of her house and spent all her time writing cryptic love poetry to God, Death, or somebody with whom she had a secret love affair:
8. An American version of Romanticism, which became politically and socially active as a reform movement bent on remaking the state. It died from the success of its offspring, the Abolition Movement, but the central idea that the world is a metaphor, not a machine, is still active in American literature:
9. A frontier clergyman who wrote metaphysical poetry to God to get psyched to preach his communal sermons:
10. A literary movement which stressed form, unity, proportion, clarity, and harmony. It emphasized the use of “universal symbols” and allusions to Greek and Roman literature and mythology:
11. A type of poetry that emphasizes the personal, passionate, and original. It valued complexity and ambiguity, and made frequent use of comparisons between seemingly dissimilar objects and ideas:
12. A comparison of two seemingly dissimilar objects to demonstrate the inter-relationship of all things. The comparison of an abstraction with an unlikely object is meant to provide startling new insights into each. For example, comparing creation to a bowling alley and the sun to a bowling ball:
13. America’s first Renaissance man and its first internationally recognized genius. He could generate money from any of his fascinating ideas or inventions, and his autobiography is a textbook of Rationalism and materialism:
14. A successful and professional magazine writer when he wasn’t blitzed on alcohol, opium or laudanum. Wrote true horror stories about his own life. Everywhere he took his love, some woman got consumption (tuberculosis) and died. He led a miserable life and was bad luck to everyone who met him:
15. America’s first internationally known poetess, whose ironic feminism went over the heads of most of her male contemporaries:
16. The religious belief of the Protestant sect that founded the Plymouth colony. It intended to purify the Church of England, believed in the innate sinfulness of humanity, and the salvation of a small group of people who had been elected (hence, their name for themselves) to carry out God’s plan on earth:
17. A sub-group of Puritans who believed that the Church of England was so corrupt that the only thing a person of good conscience could do was separate from it:
18. Puritan governor who wrote the History of the Plymouth Plantation as a demonstration of God’s providence in the lives of His chosen people, whom He sent to found his kingdom of New Jerusalem in the New World:
19. Broadway gay blade, part-time carpenter, male nurse, editor, reporter. A mysterious trip south turned him into the Kosmic Poet and Voice of Democratic Sensuality. After being fired for writing editorials in support of legalizing prostitution and the rights of young people to enjoy premarital sex, for writing a pro-Abolition editorial newspaper, for being gay, and for writing “obscene poetry,” he settled down (!) to create his lasting image as the “Good Gray Poet.” Eulogized Lincoln in his writing:
20. A philosophy which holds that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge, and that reality has an inherently rational structure which can be understood through logic and experimentation. It reached its peak of expression in modern Science:
21. America’s first big money hack. He wrote a series of Romantic adventure novels centering around a noble frontiersman named Natty Bumpo (aka Deerslayer, Hawkeye, and a half-dozen other aliases). Best known for “Last of the Mohicans,” and notorious for his stories of battles between pompous, philosophic Indians and armed Boy Scouts, who filled the air with rifleballs and rhetoric:
22. Literary movement that arose in reaction to Rationalism, holding that man is inherently good, that emotion is more important than reason, and produced works that emphasized the individual and the emotions. It saw every event in either a tragic or a heroic light and so produced some woks that were either ridiculous, sentimental, or both:
23. Refined emotion, such as
pity, compassion, awe, or terror, and refined taste, which could appreciate
something like a swamp as long as it had a haunted castle in it:
24. The philosophy that the physical world is the real world:
25. Rosseau’s term for “natural man,” whom Rousseau saw as innocent and naturally good. Romantics believed in this idealized kind of human being, despite the fact that none of them (except perhaps Melville) had ever actually seen one:
26. A New York playboy who became America’s first professional. He combined clever use of English and American copyright laws with market research by releasing new work in pieces to magazines to test public response before the book was published. Best known for “Rip Van Winkle” and Disney’s version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
27. One of the Fireside Poets whose works have fallen out of fashion because they are too easy to read and too sentimental (“The Song of Hiawatha”). Nevertheless, some portion of his works could be quoted by most literate Americans almost 100 years after he began writing:
28. The forerunner of short stories from the written traditions of literature. It emphasized the descriptive, photographic, contemporary, analytical, and entertaining aspects of telling about events:
29. Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow’s group name (for their nostalgic treatment and idealized descriptions of family, home, love, patriotism, and nature):
30. A group of young Americans, mostly New England Unitarians like Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott, who became intoxicated by the New Literature of Europe, England, and the Orient, and revolted against the Rationalism of their parents:
31. The forerunner of short stories from the oral traditions of literature. It stressed the narrative, dramatic, legendary, and imaginative aspects of telling about events:
32. Apostate preacher turned lecturer, he was the hermit guru of the Transcendentalists. His call for an American literature form and output by Americans, and about Americans, made him an intellectual hero in his own time:
33. Chains of logic that connect seemingly dissimilar ideas or categories based on the sharing of a common characteristic. The logic that underlies conversations that start out being about the weather and end up being about hamsters:
34. A part-time surveyor and full-time dinner guest who lived by a pond in the woods, hardly a stone’s throw from a hot meal, and made it seem like he lived there forever. He was a good friend of Emerson until Emerson left him in charge of his wife for the summer:
35. Style of writing favored by the Rationalists. It emphasized the use of the fewest and simplest words, a lack of literary ornamentation, and a straightforward, logical, sequential arrangement of ideas:
36. Nietzsche’s version of the Transcendental Hero, a moral adult who is above and beyond the laws of society:
37. The emotion most often aimed at by romantic writers in their attempt to overwhelm the rational mind and liberate the consciousness to the Ideal world beyond the physical. Used because it was the most powerful emotion and the easiest to stimulate:
38. An action, object, or idea used by Romantic poets to elicit a universal emotional response, such as children, youth, small furry animals, etc. Overuse of this emotional shorthand often led to sentimentality and clichés:
39. The Transcendent One, or Divine Soul, of which each individual is a part and which is most easily seen in Nature. The cosmic personality of which each individual personality is a unique variation:
40. The religious theory that the relationship between God and Man is contractual. The idea, based on this theory, that they might do some small but symbolic thing wrong, break the contract, and lose their immortality, was what made the Puritans seem like hopeless paranoids to everybody else:
41. Late 19th-century novelist and humorist who used the principles of Realistic writing to discredit earlier Romantic writers like Cooper:
42. The process of gathering evidence, formulating a hypothesis based on the evidence, conducting an experiment to test the hypothesis, and then using the newly gained information to re-formulate the hypothesis and begin the process all over. The Rationalist’s tool for reforming the world, which gave us the Industrial Revolution and the atomic bomb:
43. Whitman’s technique of listing quintessential details to create a panoramic picture. Emerson called it “making laundry lists”:
44. Burned-out Fireside poet who wrote his best poem when he was “Thanatopsis,” was bleak enough to be admired by the European Romantics:
45. The theological belief that, because God must by definition be omniscient, everything that will ever happen in the world must have been known to Him at the moment He conceptualized the Universe and must therefore already be determined:
46. Quaker Fireside poet whose religion kept him from marrying his childhood sweetheart, and may have led to his most famous poem, “Maud Miller”:
47. Whitman’s term for what Emerson called “The Poet” and Nietzsche called “The Overman”:
48. A poem in which the subject of the poem is not mentioned, but must be guessed from hints given in the poem. Used frequently by Emily Dickinson:
49. Another term for Thoreau’s technique of non-violent resistance to government, like not paying your taxes. It was later used successfully by Gandhi and Martin Luther King:
James Fenimore Cooper Associational Logic Edgar Allan Poe
Phyllis Wheatley Nathanial Hawthorne Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson Henry David Thoreau Realism
Riddle Poem Covenant theology
Passive resistance John Greenleaf Whittier Cosmic Poet
Mark Twain Scientific method Cataloguing
Phyllis Wheatley Romanticism The Oversoul
Emotional touchstone Transcendentalists Tale Sketch
The Overman Washington Irving Separatists
William Bradford The Elect Laudanum
fear Puritanism
metaphysical Anne Bradstreet
metaphysical conceit Edward Taylor classical allusion
Jonathan Edwards Neoclassicism Benjamin Franklin
Rationalism Sensibility “Noble Savage”
Ralph Waldo Emerson Plain Style Aristotelian Logic
William
Wadsworth Longfellow William
Cullen Bryant Fireside Poets
