Poetry tips and tricks (GRE Lit)

[Poiple]

Hello...I, like most of us, am currently studying for the GRE Literature subject exam and was wondering if anyone has any tips for memorising the poetry, or any knowledge of how poetry is used on the exam. I'm fine with prose and longer works where you can really get your teeth into it, but I'm getting stuck trying to recognise shorter works from similar periods (for example, the romantics). Does anyone have any tips?

 

Also, I wondered if anyone had a good, reliable Greek Mythology site to look at? I'm just getting down to the Greek stuff and it's scaring the pants off me.

 

Thank you

[Dr. Old Bill]

Well, this thread has been up and reply-less for over 24 hours, so I'll chime in.

 

For what it's worth, I'm not sure memorization will be all that helpful for the GRE lit test. A lot of folks here (Lyonessrampant in particular) have commented at length about effective study techniques, as well as the Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena sites and their flashcards etc. And when it comes to poetry, memorization of individual poems strikes me as well-intentioned, but misguided. Out of 230 questions that could be derived from literally thousands of works of literature and poetry, trying to memorize even a large chunk of poems is still in needle-in-the-haystack territory. What might be more helpful is making note of stylistic differences. If you know that Donne uses conceits, and is quite haphazard with his poetic meter, then when you come across lines talking about a face reflected in a teardrop, or love being like a compass, you can safely fill in that particular bubble. You don't have to know the poems themselves to make an educated guess -- you just have to know that Donne was weird like that. Likewise, if you see a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG and it seems to be dealing with a young man, disreputable lady, or has various flower / canker analogies in it, then dollars to donuts, it's Shakespeare. And when it comes to interpretations of words or lines, memorization simply won't help you. In short, it's best to get the gist of how certain poems write -- if they're closely associated with a particular form or meter (i.e., know your Spenserian stanzas, know what the two main sonnet forms look like, know how certain poets like to indent their lines etc.), then get a sense of that. And if the oft-mentioned "Cracking the GRE" book is any guide, be sure you can at least eliminate one candidate from the five options so that you can made a somewhat educated guess.

 

As for a Greek Mythology website...I'm actually not sure. There are probably many out there, though I don't believe Greek Mythology plays a significant role in the GRE lit test. I've taken several classics courses myself, and am quite well acquainted with a lot of Greek myths personally, but I haven't come across a lot in my study as yet (though a practice question did allude to Cerberus). But I wouldn't sweat it too much.

Edited August 21, 2014 by Wyatt's Torch

[Poiple]

WT - Another excellent response, thank you! (I've green-arrowed you ). I was just having a particularly difficult day with studying yesterday, saw a few difficult poetry questions I couldn't answer, and started freaking out. What you've said makes perfect sense though, I'll probably gear my study more towards style now. I find long poems the worst, they're all somewhat morphing together in my brain.

 

Gosh, what did we get ourselves into?

[Dr. Old Bill]

If it's any consolation, my proposed specialization is poetry and poetics, yet looking at some of the questions on practice exams makes my blood run cold, even though I've studied a lot of major works (all of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of Paradise Lost, a large chunk of Canterbury Tales etc.) and have a healthy knowledge of a large swath of shorter works and one-offs. Seriously, if you know half of the answers on the test, and make educated (hell, even uneducated) guesses on the rest, you're probably going to do well enough. And as others have pointed out elsewhere, you can see some old GC threads where people say they bombed the GRE lit test (I distinctly remember one forum member saying she was in 18th percentile) and still got into Princeton or another top-tier school (I know I've seen this at least twice in old threads, so a quick search might not be a bad idea).

 

The goal is to do the best you can, of course, so study hard...but don't stress too much, because a lot of it is just plain out of your control, and it might not have a major impact on you either way.

[jhefflol]

I would just like to add that the Princeton Review's GRE book suggests that we memorize the Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, and muses and gives a nice table to assist. Their reasoning is that if you have to identify an allusion to a Greek god, there basically "gimme" points. This goes along with their suggestion to memorize some vocab and critical theories.