Students will write a 900-word, thesis driven essay on one poem by one of the poets that we read in this unit. It may be a poem that was discussed in lecture, but it does not have to be, so long as it is a poem that students were assigned to read for class. Students may consider how other poems and/or music discussed in this unit informed their reading of the poem, or to make connections between the form and/or content of the poem and other works of art and culture. Students may choose to write in the first person or the third person, and students may use insights from their lived experience to help the reader understand what they are seeing in the poem or why the poem is important to them.
The readings of the poem should pay attention to the social and political context of the poem, the literary form of the poem, and the political issues addressed in the poem. Students will not be given a list of topics to write about, nor will they be given a rubric. Rather, students will be asked to use the introduction to explain what poem they plan to discuss, how their discussion is building on a key idea form the class lectures, and what narrow, debatable, and provable point they wish to make about the poem. Students, moreover, are encouraged not to deal with entire poems, since these topics can be too big for a small paper to cover adequately, Thus, students should pick a particular major or minor theme, a formal element, or a section of the poem and discuss why it is important.
This is not a five-paragraph essay. That is, the paper should not have an introduction, three somewhat related topics, and a conclusion that repeats what was said in the paper. The entire paper should argue for one narrow, debatable, and provable thesis. Each paragraph should build on the thoughts and ideas from the previous one. Rather than repeating yourself in the conclusion, students should take the last paragraph as an opportunity to reflect on what they did not have the time and space to discuss, to ask questions that they do not know the answer to, or to suggest possible implications of their reading for the broader themes of the class.
Students may write about any passage or topic within the poem they wish, so long as they can back up what they are saying with textual evidence. When marking the assignment, the professor and the grader-marker will consider the following questions:
Is it clear which poem is under discussion and what section of the poem is being discussed?
Is it clear what the student thinks is important or interesting about the passage, theme, or texts under discussion?
Is the discussion meaningfully connected to the larger ideas in the class? Does it address the form and content of the poem?
Does the critical summary use MLA style citations?
Students may get help for this paper with the academic writing center, or they can ask a colleague to help them proofread the paper. If students get help with the paper, however, they must provide a footnote after the first sentence of the paper that clearly indicates who helped them, what they helped with. Moreover, if students use any webpages like Wikipedia, SparkNotes, or any other service designed to explain the poems when working on the paper, they must give a footnote (in MLA style) clearly indicating what webpages they used. Students only need to provide a works cited page if they cite or engage with works outside of the assigned reading for the class.
MLA style, double spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font, 900 words
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