21L.004 | Spring 2018 | Undergraduate

Reading Poetry

Assignments

Analytic Essay

Analytic Essay

Your best work for this class has combined close observation of evidence with a coherent narrative about how the poem works and produces meaning; anyone could read such an essay and feel they have heard new layers of meaning that give the work more resonance and make experiencing it more satisfying and engaging. That’s really how to think about the work of writing about poetry: be a welcoming and trustworthy guide to other readers.

This essay focuses on one of the poems we’ve read this month—your choice—with one additional element.

For essays on either flavor of this assignment, please provide a title that is not the title of the poem, but gives some idea of your interpretation, the questions you address, or what you find most interesting about the work.

The essay should be 4 pages (roughly 1000 words).

A: Frost, “Birches”; Hughes, “Harlem”; Cohen, “Lit”; Pardlo, “Double Dutch”; Jess, work from “Olio”; Trethewey, “Incident.”

For essays about the poems in A, I’d like you to incorporate something that the poet has said about poetry in general, or his or her work in particular, that seems useful or relevant to you in understanding the poem. If you’re working on Olio, you may have notes of your own. For the other poets, try these resources:

Frost

Hughes

Jess

Pardlo

Cohen

Clifton

Trethewey

B: Lowell, “For the Union Dead”; Pardlo, “For Which It Stands.”

For essays about the two poems above, I’d like you to incorporate information about a couple of the poem’s important allusions (condensed references to external places, events, texts, and so on), for which a more complete understanding of something briefly referenced in the poem expands our understanding of what it says. This is one of the only times I will encourage you to use Google, at least as a place to start!

Course Info

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As Taught In
Spring 2018
Learning Resource Types
Written Assignments