English Assignment: Poetry Essay

Length: approx. 1000-1500 words

Be sure to review and use the "Guidelines and Tips" handout distributed earlier this term. All the comments on it about Basics of Format, Introductory Paragraphs, Paragraphing, Author information, Use of "I," Secondary (critical sources), Quotations, and Works Cited all apply to the poetry essay as well. The only major format guideline to add here is that when you quote lines of poetry in your paragraphs - passages three lines or less, unless they are very short lines - you need to indicate the line breaks with slashes ( / ). That is, a passage in a poem such as

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Would appear in your paragraph, between quotation marks, this way: "For she was the maker of the song she sang. / The every-hooded, tragic-gestured sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing." It is very important to indicate line-breaks; otherwise you eliminate major choices the poet has made for pacing and spacing the poem, and you turn the poetry into prose. If you're quoting four lines or more, indent (with TAB) and set off the quotation exactly as it appears in the original, without quotation marks around it, like the quotation from Wallace Stevens as it was first given above. When longer quotations are set off in actual separate lines, don't use slash marks between lines.
The topics given below are all for comparison and contrast of two-three poems. Be sure to remember comments on the short-story essay handout about moving back and forth between the works rather that writing separate discussions. As far as possible, focus on the particular theme of your essay. If you choose the topic of address, for instance, you need to write primarily about the poem's speaker and addressee (though inevitably your essay might touch on topics such as imagery, metaphor, line-length, and sound, especially in how they relate to your topic of address).

All page numbers below are in The Rattle Bag.

Chose one of the nine following topics:

1. Imagery and metaphor in Thomas 161 and Neruda 435-36

2. Address* in Lowell 24-25, Ransome 82-83, Tennyson 85, Johnson 324, Lawrence 294-96 (choose 3 of the 5 poems listed)

3. Blank verse in Frost 78-79 and Wordsworth 115-17

4. Ballads by Auden 39-41, Brooks 62-63, Causley 64-66, Bishop 92-97 (choose 2 of the 4)

5. An analysis of 4 of the "Hunter Poems of the Yoruba" (pick 4 from the 10 poems) 197-203

6. Imagery of the body in Graves 235-36, Neruda 435-36, Smith 311-312.

7. Birds of prey in Lawrence 138-39, Eberhard 371-72, Hopkins 468.

8. Insect poems by Holub 159-60, Graves 160, Anon. 249, Lawrence 294-96 (choose 3 of the 4)

9. Childhood in MacNeice 53-54, Bishop 268-69, Riding 359-60. , Wordsworth 419-20 (pick 2 or 3 from these 4)

* We won't explicitly be talking much about address until the final two classes, after your essay is due. In short, address is the element in some poems by which a speaker talks not only about but to someone or something. So when we read the poem, in a sense we eavesdrop on someone's act of talking to an addressee. The "addressee" is the audience, listener, receiver of the address. Poems can use a very wide variety of addressees: in our final four poems of the term, the addressees will include a husband, a "tyger," "the universe" and "my friends" (which might include us, the readers).