Questions we Can Help you to Answer
Paper Instructions:
Formatting requirements: Use standard MLA document formatting requirements. Google “OWL Purdue MLA documentation style” and click on the first link for a sample and detailed information.
Length: 500 to 1,000 words, not including the Works Cited page
Due Date: See your syllabus.
Submission Directives: Submit your essay as an attachment to the Assignment dropbox in the designated Learning Unit. (See your syllabus and the Learning Units).
Assignment Objectives: Your goal is to apply a critical strategy to a work and to develop and support a specific thesis. Your essay should be unified, developed, organized, and coherent, and should use sophisticated sentence style while meeting the demands of standard English. I’ve given you specific topics to get you started thinking, along with plenty of handouts to help guide you.
Rubric: Be sure to read the designated rubric carefully so that you have a clear idea of what criteria I will be using as I grade your essay.
Instructions: Choose ONE of the topics below on the poems that have been assigned over the last several weeks and write a double-spaced essay (500 to 1,000 words) supporting an interpretation of the poem. Use the sample essays in your Literature text, as well as the handouts as guides. You can choose a formalist approach or any of the contextual approaches, but be sure to support your thesis with evidence from the poem itself. Also, be sure that you explain how that evidence fits your interpretation. You are trying to convince your reader that your way of approaching the poem is a reasonable one.
Here are some possible topics, although you can choose another way of approaching your poem if you'd like, as long as you can make a good case for your claims:
1) Examine Theodore Roethke's diction in "My Papa's Waltz." How and why does he use negative and positive connotations in his word choices to describe the young boy's experience?
2) What does Owen Wilfred in "Dulce Et Decorum Est" hope to achieve through his choice of imagery? How does he do so?
3) Examine William Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark" for diction and imagery, as well as his use of figurative language. What emotional effects do you think Stafford is trying to achieve? How do his choices help or hinder him in his efforts?
4) Choose one of the poems we've read this quarter and apply a contextual approach, such as feminism. Be sure to connect your claims about the meaning of the poem to the poem iself by examining and explaining the poet's choices (words, phrases, rhymes, images, metaphos, etc.)
5) Write an essay in which you argue that either Rod McKuen's or William Stafford's poem is superior. Establish the criteria by which you are judging the poems and then show how each poem either meets or fails to meet your criteria.
6) Write an essay in which you apply an contextual critical perspective to Lucille Clifton's "Homage to My Hips" to characterize the speaker of the poem.
7) Write an essay in which you analyze and explain how Langston Hughes uses metaphor in Harlem.
8) Write an essay in which you discuss the metaphors that Marge Piercy uses in "The Secretary Chant." How does she use these metaphors to indicate how the speaker feels about being a secretary? (You can also expand this idea to consider what Piercy is suggesting about women's place in society in general during the time that the poem was written in 1973. Remember, however, that your paper should focus on the poem and how the poet uses language to achieve the effects that she does.)
Your essay should be between 500 and 1,000 words long and should be double-spaced. Your essay should have a title, a relevant introduction, and a clear thesis statement. Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that is a claim about the poem that is related to your thesis statement. You should use carefully selected words, phrases, images, figures of speech, etc. as evidence to support your claims. All evidence should be supported by explanation and argument as well. Quoted material should be placed in quotation marks and followed by the line number or numbers in parentheses. Your paper should also contain a conclusion and a Works Cited page. You might also check out the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University for help in writing about poetry (type OWL and Purdue into Google and, if prompted, choose the link that says "Non Purdue instructors and students). Finally, check out the numerous examples of student essays in your anthology. Good luck.
The writing sample below is an excerpt from the body of an essay written by a student. Although it's far from perfect and needs more development and explanation, it has some merits as well. For one, it sticks to the point of the paragraph and does not bring in extraneous information. For another, it attempts to offer concrete evidence from the poem itself to support its claims. Finally, it attempts, although inadequately, to explain how the evidence from the poem supports the claims made in the essay.
WRITING SAMPLE:
Below is an excerpt from a paper on Lucille Clifton's “Homage to My Hips.” The paragraph begins with a clear topic sentence stating the main idea of the paragraph (in green). The writer then quotes a numbers of lines to present as evidence from the poem (in blue). Finally, the evidence is followed by a fairly strong explanation of how these lines fit the claim of the paragraph (in red), which, of course, ultimately should support the essay's thesis.
Here is Clifton's poem:
Homage to My Hips
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top
Lucille Clifton
Excerpt from a student paper:
:
Clifton develops a feminist theme by rebelling against the stereotype of thinness as a mark of female beauty, a stereotype encouraged by images in our society in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour and on television channels like MTV. She illustrates this rebellion in'the first few lines of the poem:
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places .... (1-5).
The accent in the first line falls on "hips" and on "big," emphasizing by that accent the fact that her hips are not small; one might expect the speaker, if she were intimidated by her society's views, to be ashamed of the size of her hips, but she is not. Moreover, the hips are said to "need space to / move around in," indicating that they are not able to be restricted by small spaces. The speaker does not apologize for this need but celebrates it, rebelling against those who would try to restrain her hips. The hips come to represent their owner's rebelliousness and striving toward freedom. Further, the hips "don't fit" into "petty places," (in other words, those places that are too “small” for them), but the speaker doesn't express shame or regret at this fact. Instead, she criticizes the "petty places" by using the denigrating term "little," which adds to the already negative connotations of the word "petty."
The material highlighted in "green" is the topic sentence or claim of the paragraph. The material highlighted in "blue" is the evidence. And the material highlighted in "red" is the attempt to explain the writer's reasoning for interpreting the essay in the way that she has done. The paragraph as a whole could stand smoother transitions, more explanation, and a more precise use of the evidence. Rather than simply selecting an entire block of the poem to be quoted, the student would do better to take a line, a phrase, or even a word to explain. Still, the excerpt serves as a skeletal example of the basics.
