Engl 3311 poetry essay

Grading Rubric

As always I will base your essay grade on the insightfulness of your interpretation and the clarity of your writing. For this assignment, here are the grading criteria.

· You end your introductory paragraph with a thesis that explains why the two works are better understood when examined together.

· The remainder of the essay does not simply list similarities and differences, but organizes the similarities and differences into a well-organized sequence that supports your thesis.

· Discuss all the points you want to make about one of the poems first , already having in your mind the points of comparison/contrast you want to make with the other poem. Then discuss the other poem, explicitly drawing points of comparison and contrast with the previous poem.

· You do not needs to explicate the two poems thoroughly as you did for Essays 1 and 2. The purpose is not to explain every line and words in the two poems, but to discuss and interpret selected features of the poems that relate to the overall thesis. This essay assumes that you have read the poems closely to catch the nuances of meaning throughout them, but pick out from this careful reading the most important and telling details.

· Here are some features of the poems you should discuss if they support your thesis:

a. The topic of the two poems (e.g, sexual seduction, American individualism, alienation, the poetic imagination, epiphanies, nature, women’s lives)

b. The treatment of thematic binaries that we have explored this semester (e.g., soul vs. body, love vs. lust, eternity vs. time, the sublime (or the ideal) vs. the real, the extraordinary vs. the ordinary, white vs. black, male vs. female). Keep in mind that some poems assume that these are in fact opposites while other poems seek to subvert the belief that they are antithetical.

c. Figurative language

d. Meter, rhyme, stanzas, and methods in free verse of maintaining rhythm

e. The lines (syntax, word placement, end-stopped lines, enjambed lines)

f. Repetition of sounds (rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance)

g. Tone (the poet’s or the speaker’s attitude toward the topic)

· Quote words that are key to understanding the thought and artistry of the poem, but quote only words that help establish a point about the poem. Edit out words that distract from the point you are making by cherry picking only the most relevant words and editing out any extraneous words by using a three dot ellipsis ( . . . ) to mark words that have been omitted from a quotation.

· Every quotation should be a grammatical part of a sentence of your own. Do not let a quotation stand alone as its own sentence, and especially do not quote long passages (say a whole quatrain) as a block quote or place a stand-alone quotation at the beginning of a paragraph.

· Integrate quotations into your paper coherently. Words taken out of a poem usually require you to explain in your own words the original context as you are quoting. Moreover, the words from a quotation must fit grammatically into your sentence and they must make sense with the other words in your sentence.

· Follow a quotation with its line number. If your sentence does not end with the line number, place it in parentheses at the end of the sentence before the period. If the quote appears at the end of the sentence, mark the end of the quotation with close quotes, provide the line number(s) in parenthesis, and then close the sentence with a period.

· The paper should be carefully edited for precise word choice, conciseness, syntax, grammar rules (e.g., pronoun-antecedent clarity and agreement), punctuation, and spelling.

· The paper should follow MLA specifications for the formatting of the paper and the Works Cited page. The formats may be found at owl.purdue.edu. The only entries for the Words Cited page should be our textbook and the Oxford English Dictionary if you cite it in your paper. The Works Cited page does not count toward the 4-5 minimum for the essay, but should appear as the last paginated page of your essay.

· Write a helpful title that points to the purpose or idea of the paper. Do not title the paper solely by the name of the poems.

· The ideas in your paper should all come from your ingenuity in reading the poems. You are not to use any secondary sources such as books or article or web sites about the poem you pick to write on. A paper that borrows idea or words from a secondary source will not pass.

Some Sample Topics

· Shakespeare’s Ambivalence toward the Male Friend: Sonnets 87 and 94

· Religious Guilt in Donne and Milton: Holy Sonnet 14 and “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”

· The Modern City in William Blake’s “London” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

· Nature’s Redemptive Powers: William Wordsworth’s “Lines” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”