NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
English
For your final project, you will return to the kind of work you did in your first two essays, with three changes: first, you will now be examining more than one poem; second, you will incorporate two pieces of peer-reviewed scholarship; third, you will account for the poems’ publication histories, as well as their form and content. In other words, this project combines aspects of the previous written assignments. You will submit it in two stages so that you get the most feedback.
The following framework will help you organize the material that will make up the finished product. Your paper can be based on something you’ve already discussed in one of your posts. It can address more than one poem by one poet or one poem by more than one poet. It doesn’t have to be a poem we discussed in class—it can even be one of the supplementary poems on Canvas. There is one restriction: It cannot be on poems you have written about for another assignment, though you can write about a poet that you’ve written about before.
This assignment emphasizes writing process as well as product. In other words, you’re going to turn in everything you write—your notes and your drafts. You can think of your notes as being where you make observations about the poem. Drafts are where you turn those observations into analysis. When you draft an essay, you’re trying to analyze what you observed about the poem.
Your notes should address the same topics as the first and second essays, with one important addition.
- Diction
- Rhyme
- Meter/Rhythm
- Figures, Tropes, Schemes (see Culler, Hollander, and our Google Doc!)
- Genre
- Publication History
As in the third essay, you will need to analyze your poems in specific publication contexts. Find out when and where your poems were originally published. Ideally, you will be able to examine them in their original contexts. Even if you aren’t able to do so—and I’m happy to help you locate copies of those publications—you should still know enough about how the poem was published to discuss it in your essay. Was it printed in a book of poems by a single author or in a volume that collected the work of multiple authors? Was it published anonymously or attributed to the author? Was it published in a newspaper or a magazine? Was it written for a specific occasion? The answers to these and related questions can help you make sense of what and how the poem meant.
So, here’s what I recommend you do to get started on your notes. Choose a poem and read it multiple times. Read it silently and out loud. Write on your copy of the poem. Scan it. Fill in the definitions of words you don’t know—and look up words you think you know. Mark the rhyme
scheme, if it has one. Notice other features of the poem—especially those that exemplify the literary terms in Culler, Hollander, and our Google Doc. Repeat this process (with all of the poems you’re examining), then ask yourself what any of the things you noted, in isolation, means. Ask yourself what these different things have to do with each other and what they, together, mean. Your answers to those questions will make up your first draft. Repeat this process. You’ll continue to notice new things, have new explanations for those things, and find better ways to say them.
What should your last draft do? It doesn’t have to have an argument, necessarily, but it should make some larger statement about the poem—and it, and whatever smaller statements you make, should be supported by textual evidence, by observation and analysis. When we interpret a poem, or any piece of art, we examine how its content relates to its form. Content means what the poem says; form means how the poem says it. In the end, you can’t divide the two, but it’s useful to consider them separately, as you did while writing your notes. Your last draft should strive to reintegrate the two. Rather than approach this assignment as thinking you need to tell us what this poem is about, try this instead: Tell us how it works.
Your final submission will be made up of 6-8 pages of writing (notes and drafts), or about 1,800-2,400 words. 4 of those pages, or about 1,200 words, should be the last draft. That draft should use 3-4 terms from Culler or Hollander—you don’t have to limit yourself to what’s in our Google Doc—and contain some discussion of meter/rhythm.
Before your submit the final version of your project, you will submit something to be workshopped by your peers. By the start of class on April 26, you should submit a full set of notes and at least two pages of a draft essay. You should also include a Works Cited page that names the two peer-reviewed sources you will be engaging with.
Submit everything—your marked up copy of the poem, any notes, and a revised essay—as a single PDF.
Your essay should follow the guidelines set out in the “Work” policies on the syllabus, including MLA Style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/11/
