Poetry Essay
Poetry has a lasting impact if it connects us with the history or consciousness of its moment. Yet, regardless whether we recognize the significance of a poem’s historical context, the poem’s language also gives us an aesthetic appreciation, and we can remember a line from a poem for a long time even if we do not understand every detail of a poem. You know this already, that there is something important in the way something is said; you also know that a poem points to more than your own experience.
Write an essay in which you examine both the historical significance and the aesthetic achievement of a poem from our readings. To help you get started, read through the Discussion on the poems for this week and note when students are writing about both these things. For our purposes, we will define aesthetic achievement as how a poem means on its own–the elements that make it up, and the response from you that it encourages. For historical significance, think about how the poem speaks from its own time. While it may seem relevant to our own moment, it comes from another moment.
To write your essay, you need to use one of the poems from our assigned readings. You will need to refer to one or two outside sources with your reading of the poem. You may use these sources in any manner you see fit. Some students looks for a discussion of something historical, some students use sources merely for information, and others use sources that directly refer to the poem under discussion. Use the electronic databases through the SBCC library (library.sbcc.edu) or send me a title of another scholarly source for me to approve if it is not in the databases.
Your sources must be academic, scholarly sources from peer reviewed journals. The source must be vetted and must include a list of references or works cited. You must use the library databases to search for these articles. This means no newspapers, popular periodicals, blogs, cheat sites, random websites, or book reviews. This is covered in English 110 but I want to spell it out here to forestall any issues you might have with evaluating sources.
MLA style.
poems: For the Union Dead, 215; The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, 262; Ch’ang-Kan Village Song, 212; The Second Coming, 373; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 100; Traveling Through the Dark, 320
Required Texts
Anthology: The Seagull Reader (3 book set)
