1. Which of these lines actually occurs in Murder in the Cathedral, TS Eliot's dramatisation of St Thomas Becket's bloody fate?

   1. My hours and breath grow thin as wasting Stylites/ have pity, vast heaven, on my day-long nights

   2. Take a friend's advice. Leave well alone/ Or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone

   3. Really, friends, this is too much/ I need no weak and feeble human crutch

   4. Promised you a miracle, for belief is beautiful/ Promises, promises, as golden days break wondering

2. "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song ..." From which author did Eliot borrow this line for The Waste Land?

   1. Edmund Spenser

   2. Alexander Pope

   3. Lord Byron

   4. Cole Porter

3. What does the TS stand for?

   1. Tom “Senior”

   2. Tarquin Sutton

   3. Thomas Stearns

   4. Thomas Sigismund

4. "Putting it as modestly as I can, [my poetry] wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in …”

   1. Scotland

   2. America

   3. Canada

   4. Iraq

5. Which young man, later to become a poet, did Eliot teach at Highgate school?

   1. Ted Hughes

   2. Seamus Heaney

   3. John Betjeman

   4. Roger McGough

6. What was Eliot’s impression of James Joyce when he met him on a trip to Paris?

   1. Talentless

   2. Arrogant

   3. Longwinded

   4. Generous

7. Which musical is based on one of Eliot’s poetry collections?

   1. Cats

   2. Sunset Boulevard

   3. Blood Brothers

   4. Mamma Mia!

8. Who considered Eliot’s work to be “a very great evil”?

   1. Winston Churchill

   2. Virginia Woolf

   3. CS Lewis

   4. Wyndham Lewis

9. Which of Eliot’s collections was this review in the 1917 Times Literary Supplement describing? “The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to ‘poetry’”.

   1. Four Quartets

   2. Prufrock and Other Observations

   3. Burnt Norton

   4. Ash Wednesday

10. Who edited The Waste Land?

    1. Ezra Pound

    2. Wallace Stevens

    3. Bertrand Russell

    4. Wilfred Owen

11. How does J Alfred Prufrock measure the passing of time?

    1. With an hourglass

    2. With an egg timer

    3. By pacing the streets

    4. With coffee spoons

12. “Four wax candles in the darkened room,/ Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,/ An atmosphere of …”

    1. The changing room

    2. Juliet's tomb

    3. The waning moon

    4. Death and gloom

13. How would Eliot have had The Weeping Girl “stand and grieve”?

    1. On the highest pavement of the stair

    2. Like a patient etherised upon a table

    3. Endlessly

    4. In Ezra Pound’s kitchen

14. How does The Waste Land end?

    1. Hurry up please, it’s time

    2. Not with a bang but a whimper

    3. And then it was all a dream

    4. Shantih shantih shantih

Solutions

1:B, 2:A, 3:C, 4:B, 5:C, 6:B, 7:A, 8:C, 9:B, 10:A, 11:D, 12:B, 13:A, 14:D

Scores

1. 4 and above.

   You are indeed not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. Try again - there is time yet for a hundred revisions

2. 9 and above.

   "In order to arrive at what you do not know/ You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance ... And what you do not know is the only thing you know"

3. 14 and above.

   Well I never! Was there ever a cat so clever?