ShmoopTube

00:03

Here's an unshmoopy question you'll find on an exam somewhere in life...

00:07

Which words could fill in the blanks so that the sentence below makes sense?

00:11

World War I soldiers such as Wilfred Owen were among the first to depict the blank horrors

00:16

of war in their poetry, rather than create poems that blank glorify and idealize such conflict.

00:24

And here are the potential answers...

00:30

For the first blank, we're looking for a word that could describe the horrors of war.

00:35

It looks like the first blank isn't actually going to be that helpful, though.

00:38

"Stark," "real," "grim," and "ghastly" could all be used to describe how horrible war is.

00:44

We can eliminate (D), though.

00:46

We use "frank" to describe when someone's being sincere or honest, so it doesn't really

00:51

work in this context. Congratulations, first blank, you weren't totally useless after all actually.

00:57

All right, let's move on to the second blank.

00:59

(E) can be eliminated for sure. It's not like anybody was forcing the earlier poets

01:05

to glorify war. So "had to" doesn't make sense.

01:09

(B) "yearned", "yearned" doesn't work either. The earlier poets weren't desperately longing

01:14

to write poems glorifying war; they were actually doing it.

01:18

(C) is a total no-go. "To hearken" is an old- school way of saying "to listen,"

01:23

so the word is just weird in this context.

01:25

It looks like (A) is the only choice left standing.

01:29

The earlier poets "sought to" write poems glorifying war, meaning they put their efforts

01:34

toward it. Yeah, the second blank checks out.

01:37

The first blank works too. "Stark" is used to describe something that's disturbingly

01:41

clear, which could totally apply to the horrors of war.

01:44

There you have it. The answer is (A). A for "Are we ever going to see something good

01:48

happen for the Starks of Winterfell?"

Full Transcript