Resources and Links
Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry site contains links to most of the poets we are studying, as well as excellent links and resources for many other twentieth-century American poets.
Other valuable sites include:
A Quick Guide for Quoting Poetry in Your Essays:
When you quote poetry in your essay, you need to remember a few simple conventions.
If you are quoting a single phrase, you can incorporate it in your own sentence.
Example: Bradstreet's description of her "troubled heart and trembling hand" indicates that she is physically stricken.
If you are quoting a whole line, it is usually best to introduce it with a colon. Even though the line may end with a comma, you can end it with a period so that your own sentence comes to closure.
Example: Bradstreet uses the hard "tr" sound twice to indicate the physical nature of her pain: "With troubled heart and trembling hand I write."
If you are quoting more than one line, use a colon to introduce the quotation, and indent the poem. Since the poetry is indented, there is no need to add quotation marks.
Example: Bradstreet emphasizes that God is responsible for her physical and emotional pain:
With troubled heart and trembling hand I write,
The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
If you leave material out of the quotation, use ellipses (. . .) to indicate to your reader that there is more there.
Example: Bradstreet even views the child as being "Like . . . the brittle glass."
If you quote a passage that cuts across two or more lines of poetry, indicate the line break with a slash (/).
Example: Bradstreet calls herself a "fool" because she could "look on that was lent / As if mine own."
There's no need to include page numbers or line numbers, as long as you are quoting from the poem you are focusing on. If you quote from another poem, you should put the title and page number in parentheses.
Example: Bradstreet is also concerned with fire in other poems, at one point calling it "The noblest and most active element" ("The Four Elements," 18).
If you quote from Rich's preface or Jeannine Hensley's introduction, you can just put the page number in parentheses at the end of the quotation.
Example: Adrienne Rich calls such moments "the stress-marks of anger" in Bradstreet's poems (xxi).
If you quote other critics or books, you should include the page number in parentheses, and then add a page at the end of your essay, listing the authors, titles, publishers, and publication dates of all the books you quote from.
Example: Robert Daly says, "For a creature to die young, then, God must providentially intervene in the order of nature, must suspend it" (112).
[Then, on a separate page at the end of your essay, you would include the following information: Robert Daly, God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.]