Third Essay: Williams or Hughes

Third Essay: Due in class on Friday, December 3.

Length: 4-5 pages, typed, double-spaced.

You will once again be writing on one poem, this time by either Williams or Hughes. You will be attempting to work with both the form and the meaning of the poem and trying to demonstrate how the form and meaning are woven together. Your essay should suggest how the poem you are focusing on indicates some of the more general concerns of the particular poet you are writing about.

You may write an essay on an individual poem by Williams or Hughes. With both Williams and Hughes, however, it is essential to place the single poem in the context of all their poetry and to use other poems to help you explicate specific images and details of language in the poem you choose to write about.

For Williams, you can write on "View of a Lake" (p. 95), "The Defective Record" (p. 130), "A Woman in Front of a Bank" (p. 163), or "Peasant Wedding" (p. 241, from Pictures from Brueghel; if you choose this poem, be sure to look at Brueghel's painting).

For Hughes, you can write on "Consider Me" (286-287), "Deferred" (252-254), "Daybreak in Alabama " (157), "Life Is Fine" (121-122), or "Same in Blues" (270-271).

Some Guidelines: Read the poem that you choose again and again; move it from the page into your mind where you can get to know it better. (Memorize it if you can.) Think of the poem in relation to the poet's other poems; make notes about similar images, related thoughts, parallel style and rhymes in other poems. Let the context of the poet's other poems, of his prose, and of his times illuminate the specific text you are dealing with.

Look up words in the dictionary and learn their etymologies; discover the fossil poems that lie beneath the key words in the poem. Even words that you think you know (like "celebrate") have some surprising origins which often suggest wider possibilities. But don't overdo things; don't force words out of context in order to coerce the poem into an original but far-fetched interpretation. Instead, seek to enhance the context: illuminate the full power of the words as those words work in this particular poem.

Listen to the poem, its rhymes, rhythms, repetitions, insistences, its off-rhymes, odd jumps, internal rhymes. Work on how these things carry the meaning, create the meaning, make the poem. Make notes in the margins of your book.

Try paraphrasing the poem, saying it as simply and clearly as you can. Then go back to the poem and read it next to your paraphrase. The difference between your paraphrase and the poem is what you want to focus your essay on--the things the poem does and says that don't quite get into your paraphrase.

Choose a poem that you are fascinated and confused by. Begin in confusion; work toward illumination. You will write a better paper about a poem you are initially mystified by than about a poem you think you fully understand the first time you read it. Your first draft should probe, question, try out various interpretations. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about the poem before you put anything down on paper; think about the poem by writing about it; think in writing. (Writing is slow motion thinking.) Force your ideas onto paper; sometimes it will seem as if your hands have an intelligence of their own. Then compose your essay out of the best of what emerges. Edit out the dead ends from your initial drafts. Never hand in your first draft. Focus on the insights that you come to see will help you and us (the class) see things in the poem that we hadn't seen before, things that will help us hear and understand the poem more clearly than we had before.

Your audience is this class--a group of people who have recently read Williams and Hughes carefully. So there are things you don't have to waste space saying; there are contexts that we are as a group aware of, that you can draw on but don't need to dwell on. Feel free to draw upon class discussion, but don't simply repeat things that have been said in class: use the insights you have gained in class to discover new aspects of the poetry. When you have finished your essay, you should feel satisfied that you have discovered some new things about the poem that you simply had not seen the first couple of times you read it.

Proofread your final copy carefully; edit out careless errors before the essay gets to your reader, where those errors will distract from and undermine the force of your argument.

Use the Resources page on the course website, where you will find links to dictionaries, to tips on writing essays about poetry, and to information on Williams and Hughes. Scroll down on the Resources page past the links, and you'll find a guide that I've prepared on how to quote from and cite poetry in your essay. Please read this guide and follow it.