English 110/Lawlor
Essay 2: Poetry
choose one of the following topics for the next essay:
1. A dialogue with history:
We have been looking at the poet's response--conscious or unconscious--to his or her environment, both political and personal. Using history as a context, as a starting point, how does poetry respond to political and social moments in history? Through close reading and analysis of one poem, discuss how the poet is reacting to or commenting on a political or social moment.
OR
2. Thematic unity:
Your essay should explore the connections between three poems and the thematic unity that groups them together. It should also represent your own ideas above and beyond what has been discussed in class and use substantial examples from the texts for support.
For either essay keep in mind the following:
5 pages
double spaced
a note about literary analysis
Analysis: Like copying, paraphrase, and summary, a description of a work or passage rarely stands alone as a piece of writing about literature. It is, instead, a tool, a means of supporting a point or opinion. To analyze is to break something down into its parts to discover what they are, and, usually, how they function in and relate to the whole. For instance a description of the rhyme scheme in "The Raven" by Poe tells you what that scheme or pattern is but says nothing about how it functions in the poem. If you were to add such an account to the description, then, you would have analyzed one aspect of the poem. In order to do so, however, you would first have to decide what, in a general way, the poem is about: what its theme is. If you defined the theme of "The Raven" as "inconsolable grief," you could then write an analytical paper suggesting how the rhyme scheme reinforces that theme.