Reader, tomorrow your mouse wakes up early indeed to engage in the most trivial and yet most excruciating activity the American statistical-educational complex has to offer an aspiring doctoral student in English: from the deepest, darkest, most aliterary lairs of the Educational Testing Service, the Graduate Record Examination Subject Test in English Literature.

Say it with me, reader: what a load of flaming crap.

To those of you who possess immense erudition, knollidge, smarts, book-learnin’, mental archives of the entire canon of Anglophone literature, etc.: if you could see your way ’round to sending some of that my way through whatever means you may have at your disposal, I sure would appreciate it.

To the spirits of excellent luck, bending chance, augury, test-writer-mind-reading, and sheer dumb right-place-right-timeness: o ye! guide my number two pencil that she not err nor lead me into false belief concerning early Victorian verse forms!

To everyone who has ever taken part in any decision to require these test scores or in any part of the process of producing the tests themselves: I hope you die slowly of a combination of carpal tunnel, ritual standardized humiliation, and repeated broadsword strokes to the head, you bunch of sadistic, miserable, no-account sons of syphilitic goats. Honestly. You should be ashamed of yourselves.