Discipline:
– Classic English Literature
Type of service:
Essay
Spacing:
Double spacing
Paper format:
MLA
Number of pages:
6 pages
Number of sources:
4 sources
Paper detalis:
Directions: This
essay should be typed and double spaced. The essay should be
approximately 1500-2000 words in length. The purpose of this essay is to
try to explain something about the mind and/or the life of a poet by
analyzing several works of poetry by the same poet. You can write your
essay based on the poetry of any poet you choose, as long as you can
find enough poems by that poet to analyze in your essay. The poet you
choose can be any person whose work you can analyze for its poetic
content, which may be a songwriter or a spoken-word artist in addition
to a traditional poet. Your essay must include the following contents:
A fairly detailed discussion of at least four poems by the same poet.
A biographical account of the life of the poet, focusing on
aspects of that poet’s life that you discuss in his or her poetry.
At least two sources of critical analysis on the work of the poet.
This means that if you write about the work of a poet who is not covered
with biographical information and critical essays in the textbook about
that poet and his or her work, you will have to do research to cover
that aspect of the essay. There are two poets in the textbook whose life
and work are covered in a Critical Casebook: Emily Dickinson and
Langston Hughes. If your essay covers either of these poets, you can use
material from the textbook. If you would rather not write about one of
these poets, you can write your essay based on the poetry of some other
poet whose work we may cover in class (such as Marianne Moore, Sylvia
Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, etc.), but because we won’t have covered
very many poems from those poets, you will have to find additional
poetry by that poet to analyze in your essay as well as additional
biographical and critical information about that poet. If your essay
includes discussion of poems not in the textbook, you should also attach
the full text of the poems you discuss at the end of your essay. Your
essay should be unified. That is, although you will be discussing at
least four poems by that poet, your analysis of those poems should
develop a consistent thesis about that poet and his or her poetry and
support that thesis with reference to specific aspects of his or her
poetry and life as well as in the critical sources that you cite. You
should, therefore, focus much of your essay on a single theme found in
the poems you analyze. You can analyze other aspects of the poems you
discuss, such as the tone, the imagery, the figures of speech, or any
other significant technique of those poems. But make sure that whatever
aspects of the poems you include in your essay are used to reflect on a
single theme that occurs in those poems. Relate that theme to the author
of the poems. Include information about the life or the thoughts of
that poet, and show how the poems you discuss are a reflection of
aspects of the life and the mind of that poet.
Because you are writing about poetry, and because the language used in
poetry is indispensable to understanding poetry, you must include some
actual quotations from the poems you are writing about. Choose
quotations carefully. Make sure that the quotations you include in your
essay are interesting in and of themselves and that the quotations are
appropriate to the ideas you are covering in your essay. Make sure that
you explain all the quotations you include in your essay. When you quote
from poems, if you quote four or more lines, you should introduce the
quotation with a colon and separate the lines of poetry from the body of
your essay by indenting the lines of the quotation ten spaces. If you
quote three lines or fewer, you should include the quotation in the body
of your essay, put quotation marks around the lines you quote, and
include a slash ( / ) between separate lines within the quotation. It is
not necessary to cite the page number of quotations from these poems.
If you include quotations from any other information from the textbook,
make sure to cite the author of the quotation and the page number of the
quotation in parentheses after the quotation. If you include
information or ideas from sources other than the textbook, cite the
sources for that information in your essay and prepare a Works Cited
page according to MLA format.
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