English 199
Dr. Campbell

Paper 2 Assignment

10/18                Typed thesis statement due in class

10/29                Typed draft due in class

11/1                  Final draft (typed) due in class; e-version must be sent to me by the end of the day.

The second paper assignment asks you to use the techniques of close reading to write a well-written, insightful essay interpreting one or more poems.  Although excellent insights are important, proper sentence structure and style also count.

Your choices of poems for this assignment are fairly open.  The only requirement is that the poems must be selected from our textbook. 

Choose one of the following topics.

1. Choose two or more poems that have a similar theme or subject, and write an essay in which you compare and contrast them.  You’ll want to consider the features we’ve been discussing in class: form and meter (if relevant), sound, imagery, diction, figures of speech, and so forth. You might want to look at two poems from different eras.

Here are some suggestions:

·         Race, culture, and ethnicity; African American or Native American experience; the immigrant experience (Example: “For the White Poets who would be Indian”; “America”; “Bilingual/Bilingue”)

·         Love poems (or disillusionment with love) (Examples: “Upon Julia’s Clothes”; “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”; “Neutral Tones”)

·         War poems

·         Modern life (Examples: “The Boston Evening Transcript”;  “Scenes from the Playroom”; “Richard Cory”)

·         Time, eternity, and the past (Examples: “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias”)

·         The process of, or effects of, writing poetry (Example: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”)

·         Nature (animals, control of nature, descriptions of nature, and so on) (Example: “Traveling through the Dark”; “Anecdote of the Jar”)

·         Death and dying; contemplating death (Examples: “For the Anniversary of My Death”; “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”)

·         Gender issues

·         Faith, belief , and myth (Example: “The World is Too Much With Us”; “God’s Grandeur”)

·         Family and kinship issues; relationships to ancestors, deaths, etc.

  1. If you know another language well (especially Spanish), compare the translations of some of the poems in our book with the original versions.  Be sure to analyze the poem in terms of the elements of poetry we’ve discussed in class.
  2. Choose one particular poetic form, such as the sonnet, and examine the ways in which the poets use it for various subjects and themes.  In what ways do they stretch the limits of the form, and why?
  3. Your own topic. 

The thesis statement, draft, and e-version are part of the assignment, although they are not graded; for each one missing, five points (about ½  of a letter grade) will be deducted from your paper grade.