Poetry
This poem concludes with the question, "What did I know, what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?"
What is "Those Winter Sundays?"
This is a specific kind of a run-on sentence in which two independent clauses are joined by only a comma instead of a coordinating conjunction and a comma.
What is a comma splice?
This author of Fences wrote one play for each decade of the 20th century, featuring Black American life in Pittsburg.
Who was August Wilson?
This author of Catcher in the Rye refused to sell rights to the novel so that it could be made into a movie.
Who is J. D. Salinger?
Examples of this poetic technique—repetition of initial consonant sounds— can be found in Robert Frost's poem "The Gift Outright" in the lines, "Something we were withholding made us weak" and "forthwith found salvation in surrender."
What is alliteration?
Who is Emily Dickinson?
This part of speech modifies a verb, adjective, or adverb.
What is an adverb?
When Troy says he was wrestling death for three days, Rose clarifies that he was really sick with this ailment.
What is pneumonia?
Holden Caulfield is expelled from this Pennsylvania prep school at the beginning of the novel.
What is Pencey Prep?
This device hints at a well-known person, event, or text without directly explaining it, assuming the reader will recognize the reference.
What is an allusion?
This poet and professor of English at Wellesley College wrote the words to the patriotic hymn "America the Beautiful."
Who is Katherine Lee Bates?
What is a semicolon?
This character believes he can help open the gates of heaven with his trumpet.
Who is Gabe?
Who is Robert Burns?
This device places contradictory terms side by side, such as “deafening silence,” to reveal a deeper truth.
What is oxymoron?
Robert Frost was the first poet to be asked to write and deliver a poem for a presidential inauguration, but on inauguration day for this president in 1961, the sun was too bright for the 86 year old poet to see the words on the page, so he recited a poem from memory instead.
Who was Robert F. Kennedy?
This punctuation mark is used to show possession or to demonstrate that letter(s) have been omitted in a contraction.
What is an apostrophe?
Troy describes Death in these baseball terms.
What is a fast-ball on the outside corner?
This character, whom we never meet in the novel, keeps her kings in the back row when playing checkers.
Who is Jane Gallagher?
This device uses an exaggeration for emphasis or effect, such as “I’ve told you a million times.”
What is a hyperbole?
Who is Sylvia Plath?
In the sentence, "Skiing is fun!" the word "skiing" is an -ing word acting as a noun, also known as this.
What is a gerund?
The epigraph of the play says that when the "sins of the father visit us, we do not have to" do this.
What is "play host"?
Holden enjoys discussing this work of literature with a nun he meets while having breakfast at a diner.
What is Romeo and Juliet?
This literary device uses a part of something to represent the whole (or occasionally the whole to represent a part), as in calling workers “hands.”
What is a synecdoche?