Poetry Analysis

Write an interpretive essay in which you discuss one of the following poems: Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent,” or Claude McKay’s “The White House,” or Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the rites for Cousin Vit,” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.”

As you did in your first essay, consider how elements of poetic craft such as diction, figures, sound, the line and any other aspects of language and form make our experiences of the speaker, poetic voice and/or poetic event. In addition, with these twentieth-century sonnets, consider how the poet employs the sonnet as a “given form,” as a form adopted by generations of poets before the twentieth century. By the time these poets are writing, the sonnet–as a form–has been “given” through generations of use, yet the sonnet is rarely simply “given”: as poets take up the form throughout literary history, sonnets have as often been changed, extended, revised, contested and/or renewed in terms of their conventional speaker, topic and/or form(s).

Think about how the sonnet you choose to write about interacts with the sonnet tradition and the small sampling we are reading and thinking about in ENGL 165W. How does this poem work as a sonnet? Can you identify what sonnet conventions the poet continues and where and when the poet may revise those conventions? Where and how does the poet continue the sonnet tradition? Where and how do they revise the sonnet tradition? Thinking about the sonnet as a sonnet might begin by observing whether it is a Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet or a Shakespearian (or English) sonnet, or perhaps a hybrid of both conventional forms, or perhaps something different from either of those conventional forms. If it is indeed something new, then what aspects of the poem’s language and form still make it a sonnet?

How does the choice and use of the sonnet as a form work with other aspects of poetic craft that you notice? How does the choice of this “given form” and the choices about how the poet will shape their sonnet(s)—how do these choices meet with other elements of poetic craft, make our experiences of the speaker, the voice, the poem?

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