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  • Most Repeated Topics in UGC-NET English Unit 2 (Poetry)

    Unit 2 (Poetry) is the widest unit in the UGC-NET English syllabus. It runs from Chaucer to Heaney and beyond, so many students give up on ‘covering’ it. You don’t need to. The papers keep returning to the same poets, the same poems and the same handful of technical ideas.

    We grouped the poetry questions from the previous-year papers and the most recent exams (including December 2024 and June 2026) by topic. Here is where the marks really are, in order of how often each area appears.

    In short: Victorian poetry (Tennyson and Browning above all) and the Romantics carry the largest share of Unit 2 questions. Next come the metaphysical poets, Dryden and Pope’s satire, Spenser, and modern poetry from Yeats and Eliot to Heaney. Stanza forms and the dramatic monologue are tested year after year.

    1Victorian poetry: Tennyson, Browning and Arnold

    This is the biggest single block of poetry questions. Tennyson and Browning are the two most frequently asked poets in the whole unit.

    Alfred Tennyson

    • Dramatic monologues: ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Tithonus’, both drawn from classical myth.
    • In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850): an elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, written in the ‘In Memoriam stanza’ (iambic tetrameter rhyming abba).
    • Idylls of the King (the Arthurian cycle), ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and the ‘monodrama’ Maud.

    Robert Browning

    • The master of the dramatic monologue: ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (tested in December 2024), ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’.
    • ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and the long poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69), told by several speakers.

    Arnold and the other Victorians

    • Matthew Arnold: ‘Dover Beach’, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, ‘Thyrsis’ (his elegy for Clough) and ‘Memorial Verses’.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese and the verse-novel Aurora Leigh.
    • The Pre-Raphaelites: D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market).
    • G. M. Hopkins: ‘sprung rhythm’, ‘The Windhover’, ‘Pied Beauty’ and The Wreck of the Deutschland; first published by Robert Bridges in 1918.

    2The Romantics

    The Romantic period gives almost as many questions as the Victorian. Most are about which poem belongs to which poet, and about key dates.

    PoetWorks that keep appearing
    William BlakeSongs of Innocence (1789) and of Experience (1794): ‘The Tyger’, ‘London’, ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’
    William WordsworthLyrical Ballads (1798, with Coleridge) and its Preface; ‘Tintern Abbey’; the ‘Immortality’ Ode; The Prelude (published 1850)
    S. T. Coleridge‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, ‘Dejection: An Ode’
    Lord ByronChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan (in ottava rima), The Vision of Judgment
    P. B. Shelley‘Ode to the West Wind’ (a repeated PYQ), Adonais (elegy for Keats), Prometheus Unbound, ‘Ozymandias’
    John KeatsThe odes of 1819, Endymion, Hyperion, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

    Two favourite technical points: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is built from five sonnet-like sections in terza rima, and Byron’s Don Juan uses ottava rima.

    3Metaphysical poetry and Milton

    June 2026 alone had two questions on the metaphysical poets and the conceit. Know the definitions as well as the names.

    • John Donne: Songs and Sonnets (‘The Canonization’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ with its compass conceit) and the Holy Sonnets (Holy Sonnet 17 was asked in June 2026).
    • Andrew Marvell: ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘The Garden’ and ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’.
    • George Herbert (The Temple), Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw.
    • The term: Dr Johnson used ‘metaphysical poets’ in his Life of Cowley, building on Dryden’s remark that Donne ‘affects the metaphysics’. Johnson described the conceit as ‘heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together’.
    • Milton: ‘Lycidas’ (pastoral elegy), Paradise Lost (1667, blank verse, 12 books in the 1674 edition), Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.

    4Restoration and Augustan satire

    Dryden is one of the most-asked poets of the unit, and Pope follows close behind. The questions are mostly ‘who is satirised in which poem’.

    PoemPoetWhat to remember
    Absalom and Achitophel (1681)John DrydenPolitical allegory on the Exclusion Crisis; Achitophel is Shaftesbury
    Mac Flecknoe (1682)John DrydenMock-heroic attack on Thomas Shadwell
    The Hind and the Panther (1687)John DrydenReligious allegory: the Hind is the Catholic Church
    The Rape of the Lock (1712/1714)Alexander PopeMock-epic; Belinda, Ariel and the sylphs
    The Dunciad (1728–43)Alexander PopeSatire on dullness; Theobald, later Cibber, as hero
    An Essay on Man (1733–34)Alexander PopePhilosophical poem in heroic couplets

    Also revise two mid-century poems that appear as passages: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (used for a reading passage in June 2026).

    5Renaissance poetry and the sonnet

    • Edmund Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender (1579), The Faerie Queene (1590–96), and Amoretti with Epithalamion (1595), his wedding poem, which was asked in June 2026.
    • Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella, the sonnet sequence that started the 1590s sonnet craze.
    • Wyatt and Surrey: Wyatt brought the Petrarchan sonnet into English; Surrey shaped the English (later Shakespearean) form and first used blank verse.
    • Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609): the ‘Fair Youth’ and ‘Dark Lady’ sequences.

    6Modern and contemporary poetry

    W. B. Yeats

    June 2026 asked students to arrange Yeats’s work in order. This sequence of collections is worth memorising:

    The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) → The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) → Responsibilities (1914) → The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) → Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921, with ‘Easter, 1916’ and ‘The Second Coming’) → The Tower (1928, with ‘Sailing to Byzantium’) → The Winding Stair (1929/1933).

    T. S. Eliot

    The Waste Land (1922) brings both line-identification and character questions. Know its five sections (‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, ‘What the Thunder Said’) and its figures: Tiresias, Madame Sosostris, Phlebas the Phoenician and the typist. Also revise ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Four Quartets.

    War poets, the Movement and after

    • First World War: Wilfred Owen (‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’), Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke (‘The Soldier’) and Isaac Rosenberg.
    • Later twentieth century: Philip Larkin and the Movement, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and above all Seamus Heaney, one of the most-asked contemporary poets (‘Digging’, and the bog poems such as ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Punishment’).

    7Beyond British poetry

    The syllabus covers literatures in English and in translation, and recent papers reflect this:

    • American: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson (‘Success is counted sweetest’ was asked in June 2026), Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, whose ‘I, Too’ answers Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’.
    • World poetry: a chronology question on Pablo Neruda appeared in June 2026, so major poets in translation are fair game.
    • Caribbean: Derek Walcott of St Lucia, Nobel Prize for Literature (1992). Know ‘A Far Cry from Africa’, ‘Ruins of a Great House’, the autobiographical Another Life (1973) and the epic Omeros (1990), which retells Homer in the Caribbean. Kamau Brathwaite is the other major Caribbean name.
    • Indian poetry in English is mainly tested under Unit 6, but Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Kolatkar and Kamala Das can also appear here.

    Forms and terms you must know

    Form / termQuick definitionClassic example
    Petrarchan sonnetOctave + sestet, abbaabba + cdecde (or similar)Milton, ‘On His Blindness’
    Shakespearean sonnetThree quatrains + couplet, abab cdcd efef ggSonnet 18
    Spenserian stanzaEight pentameters + an alexandrine, ababbcbccThe Faerie Queene
    Terza rimaInterlinked tercets, aba bcb cdcShelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’
    Ottava rimaEight lines, abababccByron, Don Juan
    Rhyme royalSeven lines, ababbccChaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
    Dramatic monologueA single speaker addressing a silent listener and revealing characterBrowning, ‘My Last Duchess’
    ConceitAn elaborate, surprising comparisonDonne’s compasses
    Pastoral elegyMourning a death in a shepherd setting‘Lycidas’, Adonais, ‘Thyrsis’

    Figures of speech are also asked directly. June 2026 had a question on synecdoche (a part standing for the whole, as in ‘all hands on deck’); revise it alongside metonymy, oxymoron, zeugma and apostrophe.

    How the questions are asked

    Question typeWhat it usually tests in Unit 2
    Match List I with List IIPoem ↔ poet, poet ↔ age or movement, form ↔ example
    ChronologyCollections of one poet (Yeats, Neruda) or poems across centuries
    Line identificationWhich poem or poet a famous line comes from (The Waste Land, Donne, Shelley)
    Reading passageComprehension questions on an extract (e.g. The Deserted Village)
    Concept questionsConceit, dramatic monologue, metre, rhyme scheme, figures of speech

    A 7-day revision plan for Unit 2

    1. Day 1: Tennyson and Browning, with the dramatic monologue.
    2. Day 2: Arnold, the Brownings, the Rossettis and Hopkins.
    3. Day 3: Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, with key dates.
    4. Day 4: Byron, Shelley and Keats; then the forms table.
    5. Day 5: Donne, Marvell, Herbert and Milton; then Dryden and Pope.
    6. Day 6: Spenser and the sonnet; Yeats’s chronology; The Waste Land; war poets and Heaney.
    7. Day 7: American and world poetry, figures of speech, then a timed full-length mock test.

    Practise with full-length mock tests

    Our November NET English Marathon has 10 full-length mocks on the real NTA pattern, with an explanation for every answer.

    See the November MarathonTry a Free Test

    Frequently asked questions

    Which poets are asked most often in UGC-NET English Unit 2?

    Tennyson and Robert Browning lead, followed by Dryden, Donne, Blake, Byron, Arnold and, among modern poets, Yeats, Eliot and Seamus Heaney.

    Which period of poetry is most important?

    The Victorian and Romantic periods together account for the largest share of poetry questions. Start your revision there.

    Do I need to learn metre and rhyme schemes?

    Yes. Stanza forms such as terza rima, ottava rima, rhyme royal and the Spenserian stanza are asked regularly, often through a famous example.

    Is American poetry part of Unit 2?

    Yes. The syllabus covers poetry in English beyond Britain, and recent papers have asked about Dickinson and Langston Hughes.

    Also read: Most Repeated Topics in UGC-NET English Unit 1 (Drama), and our guide to the Unit 2 syllabus.

  • Most Repeated Topics in UGC-NET English Unit 1 (Drama)

    Unit 1 (Drama) is one of the most predictable units in the UGC-NET English paper, and one of the most rewarding. The same periods, plays and question patterns come back year after year, sometimes almost word for word. If you know where the examiners keep looking, you can turn this unit into sure marks.

    We went through the recent papers (including December 2024 and June 2026) together with the older previous-year questions, and grouped every drama question by topic. Below are the topics that keep returning, in order of how often they appear, with the exact facts you need for each.

    In short: Shakespeare (especially the First Folio and the order of his plays), Restoration comedy (above all The Way of the World), Elizabethan–Jacobean revenge tragedy, medieval drama, and modern British drama from Shaw to Stoppard account for most Unit 1 questions. Most of them come as Match the List and chronology questions.

    1Shakespeare: First Folio, chronology and characters

    Shakespeare appears in every paper, often in three or four questions at once. Three angles repeat again and again.

    The First Folio

    A factual question on the First Folio appeared in both December 2024 and June 2026. Learn these four facts:

    • Published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death (1616).
    • Compiled by his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell.
    • Contains 36 plays, about half of which had never been printed before. Pericles is not included.
    • It divides the plays into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, and carries Ben Jonson’s tribute ‘To the memory of my beloved, the Author’.

    The order of the plays

    Chronology questions on Shakespeare were also repeated in recent papers. Exact dates are disputed, so NTA usually asks about plays that are far apart. This approximate order is enough:

    PeriodKey plays (approximate order)
    Early (1590–1594)Henry VI 1–3 → Richard III → The Comedy of Errors → Titus Andronicus → The Taming of the Shrew
    Lyrical (1595–1599)Romeo and Juliet → A Midsummer Night’s Dream → The Merchant of Venice → Much Ado About Nothing → As You Like It → Julius Caesar
    Great tragedies (1600–1607)Hamlet → Twelfth Night → Othello → King Lear → Macbeth → Antony and Cleopatra
    Late plays (1608–1613)Coriolanus → Cymbeline → The Winter’s Tale → The Tempest → Henry VIII (with Fletcher)

    Groupings and characters

    • Romances (late plays): Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
    • Problem plays (F. S. Boas’s term): All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida.
    • Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus (and the earlier Titus Andronicus).
    • Genre traps: Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy, not a problem play; Cymbeline is a romance, not a revenge tragedy. Both points have been tested.

    Character questions favour the tragedies: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia (King Lear), Iago, Emilia and Roderigo (Othello), Polonius, Laertes and Horatio (Hamlet). Recent papers also ask you to identify who speaks a famous line, so revise the key speeches of Hamlet and Othello with their speakers.

    2Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy

    This is the single most reliable block of marks in Unit 1. Questions on Restoration comedy outnumber almost every other drama period in the previous-year papers, and Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) appeared in both December 2024 and June 2026.

    PlayDramatistCharacters to remember
    The Way of the World (1700)William CongreveMirabell, Millamant, Lady Wishfort, Fainall, Mrs Marwood, Waitwell, Foible
    The Country Wife (1675)William WycherleyHorner, Margery Pinchwife, Mr Pinchwife
    The Man of Mode (1676)George EtheregeDorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter
    The Rivals (1775)R. B. SheridanMrs Malaprop, Lydia Languish, Captain Absolute
    The School for Scandal (1777)R. B. SheridanLady Teazle, Joseph and Charles Surface
    She Stoops to Conquer (1773)Oliver GoldsmithMarlow, Kate Hardcastle, Tony Lumpkin

    Also know the ‘proviso scene’ between Mirabell and Millamant in Act IV of The Way of the World, Wycherley’s other comedy The Plain Dealer, and Goldsmith’s essay on ‘laughing’ versus ‘sentimental’ comedy (1773), which explains why he and Sheridan wrote against the sentimental drama of their day. The word malapropism comes from Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop, and it is a favourite one-line question.

    3Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, especially revenge tragedy

    Expect at least one question on the revenge tradition, often as a ‘which of these is not a revenge tragedy’ question.

    • Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587): the model for the genre, with a ghost, madness and a play-within-the-play.
    • Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet.
    • John Webster, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.
    • The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), now usually attributed to Thomas Middleton (once to Cyril Tourneur).

    Alongside these, revise the University Wits (Lyly, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe, Marlowe, with Kyd often added), Marlowe’s four major plays (Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II) and Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton. Gorboduc was asked again in June 2026: it is the first English tragedy in blank verse.

    4Medieval and early Tudor drama

    A small topic that gives easy marks, because the facts are few and fixed:

    • Mystery (cycle) plays: the York, Chester, Wakefield (Towneley) and N-Town cycles. The ‘Wakefield Master’ wrote The Second Shepherds’ Play.
    • Morality plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind and Everyman, with personified virtues and vices.
    • Interludes: John Heywood’s short comic pieces.
    • First English comedies: Ralph Roister Doister (Nicholas Udall) and Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

    5Modern British and Irish drama

    Twentieth-century drama is tested mostly through play–dramatist matching. The names that recur are:

    • G. B. Shaw: the most frequently asked modern dramatist. Know his Plays Unpleasant (Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession) and Plays Pleasant (Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell), plus Man and Superman, Saint Joan and Back to Methuselah.
    • Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia.
    • T. S. Eliot’s verse plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, The Elder Statesman.
    • Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest.
    • John Osborne and the ‘Angry Young Men’: Look Back in Anger (1956), with Jimmy Porter. Osborne was asked in June 2026.
    • Beckett, Pinter and the Absurd: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape; Pinter’s ‘comedy of menace’ (The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming). The label ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ comes from Martin Esslin.
    • Irish dramatic revival: Synge (Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World) and O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock).

    6Other areas on the syllabus

    These come up less often, but one question from them is common, so a short list of facts is worth keeping ready.

    • Greek drama and Aristotle: the six parts of tragedy in the Poetics (plot, character, thought, diction, song, spectacle), hamartia, catharsis, peripeteia and anagnorisis.
    • European drama: Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Ghosts), Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht’s epic theatre and ‘alienation effect’.
    • American drama: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie) and Edward Albee.
    • African drama: Wole Soyinka, the first African winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986). Know The Lion and the Jewel (1959), A Dance of the Forests (written for Nigerian independence, 1960), The Road and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), which blends Yoruba ritual with tragedy.
    • Indian drama: Girish Karnad (Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagamandala), Vijay Tendulkar (Ghashiram Kotwal, Silence! The Court Is in Session), Badal Sircar (Evam Indrajit) and Mahesh Dattani (Final Solutions, Tara).

    How the questions are asked

    Question typeWhat it usually tests in Unit 1
    Match List I with List IIPlay ↔ dramatist, character ↔ play
    ChronologyOrder of Shakespeare’s plays, or of plays from different centuries
    Statement I and IIGenre facts (e.g. romance vs revenge tragedy), First Folio details
    Assertion–ReasonWhy a play belongs to a movement (Absurd, Restoration, morality)
    Line identificationWho speaks a famous line from Hamlet, Othello or King Lear

    A 7-day revision plan for Unit 1

    1. Day 1: First Folio facts and the Shakespeare chronology table above.
    2. Day 2: Characters and famous lines from Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.
    3. Day 3: Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy, with the character table.
    4. Day 4: Revenge tragedy, the University Wits, Marlowe and Gorboduc.
    5. Day 5: Medieval drama, and Shaw’s pleasant and unpleasant plays.
    6. Day 6: Eliot, Wilde, Osborne, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard; then Indian and American drama.
    7. Day 7: Take a timed Unit 1 test and revise every question you got wrong.

    Test yourself on Unit 1 now

    Our free 25-question Drama test follows the real NTA pattern, with an explanation for every answer.

    Take the Free Drama TestSee the November Marathon

    Frequently asked questions

    How many questions come from Unit 1 (Drama) in UGC-NET English?

    NTA does not fix a number for each unit, but drama questions appear in every paper. With 100 questions spread over 10 units, you should expect several drama questions directly, plus more through comprehension passages and mixed chronology questions.

    Which dramatist is asked most often?

    Shakespeare, by a wide margin. After him, Restoration comedy (Congreve, Wycherley, Etherege), Shaw and Stoppard come up most often.

    Do previous-year questions really repeat?

    Yes. In recent papers, questions on the First Folio, the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays and the characters of The Way of the World appeared again in almost the same form. Solving previous-year papers is one of the best uses of your time.

    Is Indian drama important for UGC-NET English?

    It is part of the syllabus and appears in some papers, usually as a play–dramatist match. Karnad, Tendulkar, Sircar and Dattani are the essential names.

    Next: Most Repeated Topics in UGC-NET English Unit 2 (Poetry).

    Want to go further? Read our guide to the full UGC-NET English syllabus and practise with the previous year question papers.