poety

Poetry Writing Analysis

In a well-crafted essay of three to four pages (excluding the pages on which your own poem and the poem you are working with are placed), refer to our lecture and consider the following questions.

1.      Does your poem extend or argue with the tradition of the poem you selected to imitate?

2.      What relationship to historical context does your primary poem bear?

3.      What relationship to historical context does your own poem bear? 

4.      What is the role your reader plays as a participant in creating the poem’s meaning?

5.      Look at William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, particularly his concept of “the overflow of powerful emotion...recollected in tranquility” compared to T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, in which he rejects emotion: “It is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility” from which poetry is crafted. (These essays are online and easily found.)

Eliot argues that:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Given Eliot’s Modernist argument with Wordsworth the Romantic, where would you position your poem? Do you write from strong emotion? Do you recollect emotion in tranquility, or are you a cold craftsman?

This assignment asks you to understand the lecture material fully. You may wish to read Wordsworth’s essay, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads and T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent on your own. Both essays are available online. It is recommended that you not conduct research outside of your text and the essays mentioned above, and that all sources used must be scrupulously cited in APA format.