Description
For your first paper, I want you to explore one of the poems listed on the second page. Your “exploration” should focus on some issue raised by the poem, or some question you might ask about the poem, that seems to you to be both interesting and complicated. It isn’t sufficiently interesting to choose randomly three metaphors in a poem (without explaining what is significant about the three metaphors) and explore what each of them might mean because there’s no obvious reason that someone who’s read the poem would care about the metaphors that are your focus. It isn’t sufficiently complicated (to choose an absurd example) to answer a question about how many times conjunctions are used within a poem – no reader of a poem would ever care about the answer to such a question, and thus even a successful answer to the question would strike any reader of your paper as pointless.
How do you decide if an issue or question is worth exploring? The easiest way is to think about the kinds of issues or questions that the poem might raise for any informed reader of the poem, and then decide whether you can explore one of these issues or questions in a way that an informed reader might find persuasive. Your goal should not be to “prove” whatever you want to say about the poem. Rather, your goal should be to present your ideas in a way that is persuasive, which means (at the least) doing three things.
First, you must show how and why your specific points are connected to each other and help to develop the overall focus or argument of your paper.
Second, you must provide evidence for the claims that you are making, which means looking closely at how the words in the poem have led you to the claims that you are making. (Looking closely at the words can obviously include exploring how such things as tone, meter, and figural language enter into your claims about how the words of the poem should be understood.)
Third, you must quote frequently from the poem to support the claims that you are making, and you must show how and why the passages that you quote provide such support.
Two sample papers in your text – on John Donne [pp. 824-826] and on Emily Dickinson [pp. 861-863] – are good models for how to quote from poetry. I’ve posted three sample papers in the Course Information module on Canvas, as well as a file that explains the rules for, and gives examples of, quoting from poetry. You should also look at the document “Some Do’s and Don’ts for Your Essay” that’s posted in the Course Information module.
The paper should be 1600 to 1700 words in length, and should be typed and double-spaced. The due date for the paper is Monday, October 7. The paper should be submitted to Canvas.