Poetry paper

Final Paper Assignment

For the last paper, you should focus on a poem or poems. You have several options:

Write about one (or two) or the poems we’ve discussed in class, with the aim of bringing some new perception to it. For example, we’ve discussed some poems in pairs because one refers to the other and helps us to understand it—we’ve discussed this in class, but you could take it further and deeper.

Write about a theme that you find in more than one poem, particularly in which the positions taken are different. “Out, Out” by Frost and “How Annandale Went Out” both talk about when life becomes unlivable—how far do you go to save life? Why do the personae—the speakers within the poems—make the choices they do? How does the Macbeth speech add to the discussion—or does it? You could also take the Macbeth poem by itself for analysis of its various complexities.

Write about two war poems that present similar arguments in different ways: the fact that war isn’t pretty, and people back home really don’t know what it is like—and maybe it is better that way. You can talk about the “human” behind the “soldier”—as in “Vergissemeinnicht” or “The Death of a Soldier.”

You may take a poem, as in the last paper, and relate it to you—starting with a thesis that connects the poem to your experience, develop a paper that sheds light on what the poem has to say because of something that happened in your life, and then come back full circle to connect to how the poem helped you understand better the experience you had.

You may choose a poem we have not covered. IF YOU CHOOSE TO DO SO, YOU MUST GET THE POEM APPROVED BY ME: NOT ALL POEMS ARE CREATED EQUAL AND JUST BECAUSE IT IS IN POETIC FORM DOES NOT NECESSARILY MAKE IT “GOOD.”

You should write a draft of this over the weekend—get a solid sense of your ideas and get them down on paper and bring that with you to your conference next week. If you don’t have a draft, there won’t be anything for us to talk about and your conference will be a waste of time. Conference time is not time to figure out what poem you want to write about; it is about improving on the ideas you already have developed. If you have a question about the topic you’ve chosen or the direction you’re going, send me an e-mail so that I can get back to you.