Poetry Essay

(Total value: 150 points)

Due Date: 10/30/08

General Guidelines:

• Required word count is 900 to 1000 words. If your paper falls short of the minimum required word count the grade will certainly suffer.
• Double space.
• Remember to title your essay, but no part of your title should read “poetry essay,” or anything along those lines. Make up a title.
• This is an argumentative paper, so you must have a strong thesis and you must advance an argument.

Prompt:

Group together any of the poems we have read from our course book, The Norton Introduction to Literature 9^th ed., and/or from class handouts, and write an argumentative paper with your thesis statement located as the final sentence of your introductory paragraph.

I suggest that you group together no more than three poems, for to examine more than three in the economy of a 900 to 1000 word paper would prove unwieldy. In other words, the analyses of the poems would turn out to be insufficient.

Moreover, you could certainly engage only a single poem, or two poems, but that is entirely your choice.

While the grouping of the poems is entirely your own choice, I make some recommendations below, for if you decide to engage more than one poem in your paper there should be some common theme or connection between the poems that you will argue for.

Group 1:

Choose from the list below and find a connection that will allow you to frame a thesis as the final sentence of your introductory paragraph, and then spend the remainder of the paper analyzing the poems, so as to prove that your thesis is valid. For this group it makes some sense that you could engage four or even all five of the sources. However, quotations from two of the sources would have to be keep extremely short, or too much space in your paper will be quoted material).

· John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XI”

· John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV”

· John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XV”

· The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

· Thomas a Kempis, excerpt from The Imitation of Christ

Group 2:

Choose any three or less from the list below and find a connection that will allow you to frame a thesis as the final sentence of your introductory paragraph, and then spend the remainder of the paper analyzing the poems, so as to prove that your thesis is valid. You may wish to consider gender roles, and the degree to which the speaker acknowledges, accepts, or rejects such roles. Also, what form or forms do acknowledgement, acceptance and rejection take in the respective works? Are there covert forms? Overt forms? Is there only one form in a respective work, or more than one?

· Lady Mary Wortley Montagu “Written the First Year I Was Marry’d”

· Marge Piercy “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen”

· Paulette Jiles “Paper Matches”

· Marilyn Hacker “Who Would Divorce Her Love”

· Amy Lowell “The Lonely Wife”

· Liz Rosenberg “The Silence of Women”

Group 3:

This one really isn’t a group, for it consists of only Paradise Lost, but it is such a rich text that surely a 900 to 1000 word paper should not be a problem. Consider the following:

In book 9, Satan is successful in tempting Eve into eating the apple. Eve has free will, and she makes the choice to be disobedient to God, but to what degree is Eve to blame? In other words, are there mitigating factors that we should take into account when assigning blame to Eve? Was she duped by a superior being in Satan? How do we deal with the fact that if God is indeed omnipotent then he must know in advance that Adam and Eve will fall, yet he allows the events to take place?

How to turn in this essay: a paper copy is due during class on the due date. Additionally, an electronic copy is due, prior to the beginning of class, on the due date, and it must be turned in to TurnItIn.com as a MS Word doc or docx file. Use the TurnItIn.com “file upload” method on the submit screen. You will be instructed during class about how to create a TurnItIn.com account, and how to turn in your work. Your essays will be considered late until both the paper copy and the electronic copies are turned in. All other rules for late work, as delineated in section fifteen of the course syllabus, also apply. Moreover, your electronic turn-in must be an exact duplicate of the paper copy. In other words, no further corrections or revisions will be accepted. Also, if the electronic and paper copies do not match up it will have a negative impact on the assignment’s grade.

Due Date: 10/30/08