Essay 3 – Poetry Analysis
Compose an essay of 900 to 1200 words, or 3 to 4 pages (plus the Works Cited page), in which you analyze two poems on a similar theme. Compare “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. How are the poems similar or different in various elements of poetry such as the speaker, situation and setting, theme, tone, word choice, and imagery? What does your comparison reveal about the poems?
Sources
Refer to these two scholarly articles to guide your understanding and analysis of the two poems:
Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “An Essay on ‘My Papa’s Waltz.’” Poetry for Students, Gale. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420008398/GLS?u=tel_a_pstcc&sid=GLS&xid=ef4a2935. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
Johnson, Jeannine. “An Overview of ‘Those Winter Sundays.’” Poetry for Students, Gale. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420007801/GLS?u=tel_a_pstcc&sid=GLS&xid=e77fe673. Accessed 19 Oct. 2020.
Your primary sources in this essay are the poems. As a writer, you are analyzing the works of the celebrated poets Robert Hayden and Theodore Roethke, so refer to these authors by name in your sentence, quote the poems directly, and cite the line numbers in parentheses after the quotation. In MLA style, quotations from poetry are cited by line number, not page number, in the parenthetical in-text citation. See Chapter 34 in the Norton Introduction to Literature for more information and guidance on quoting and citing poetry.
Your secondary sources in this essay are the scholarly journal articles. As a student of poetry, you are guided by the analytical ideas of other scholars of poetry, and as a student of college writing, you are guided by the writing style of other academic writers. However, you are not analyzing this work in your writing assignment, so you do not need to quote the scholars directly or mention the scholars’ names in your sentence. Instead, for these secondary sources, you can just paraphrase the source and cite the author name in your parenthetical in-text citation. In MLA style, the parenthetical in-text citation usually includes both the author last name and the page number, but if it is a source without page number, such as these electronic sources, the citation includes just the author name.
Works Cited
Your Works Cited page should have four items in alphabetical order by author last name: the two poems and the two scholarly articles. List the poems as they appear in our textbook just as you did the short stories for our earlier essays.
