ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS

 

SECOND ESSAY: Due Thursday, November 17, in class.

Assignment: You will focus on a single Whitman poem that deals in some way with the Civil War. Use your reading in the Reynolds biography to contextualize the poem, and use your reading in other poems by Whitman to offer a sense of how the particular poem you are writing about relates to and resonates with ideas that appear more generally in the poet's work.

Whitman poems you can choose from: "Ashes of Soldiers" (pp. 598-600, originally a Drum-Taps poem); "To the Leaven'd Soil They Trod" (p. 458); "Dirge for Two Veterans" (pp. 447-448); "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" (pp. 438-439); "The Artilleryman's Vision" (pp. 450-451).

I would like you to use a Dickinson poem either in the introduction or conclusion to your essay. Choose a Dickinson poem about the war that serves as a good contrast to or comparison to the Whitman poem you are writing about. If you find a Dickinson poem that pairs well with the Whitman poem you choose, you may write a comparative essay that explores in depth the relationship between the two poems. Otherwise, I would like you to either introduce or conclude your essay by using the Dickinson poem to set up or to clinch your argument about the Whitman poem. You can use any Dickinson poem you'd like: some you might consider are #286 ("That after Horror"); #565 ("One Anguish--in a Crowd--"); #724 ("It's easy to invent a Life--"); #1188 ("'Twas fighting for his Life he was--").

Format: 4-5 pages, typed, double-spaced. Name in upper right hand corner of all pages. Staple (or paperclip) the essay in the upper left hand corner. Be sure to give your essay a title, and work to make the title engaging and accurate (not "A Paper about a Civil War Poem by Whitman"). Always keep a photocopy of your essay (or a computer backup file) in a safe place in case your paper should get lost or misplaced.

For audience, strategy, and resources, see the material appearing with the assignment below. For general help with writing the essay, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

FIRST ESSAY: Due Thursday, October 13, in class.

Assignment: You will offer a close reading of Dickinson's poem # 970 ("Color--Caste--Denomination") OR poem #762 ("The Whole of it came not at once").

Format: Around 3-4 pages, typed, double-spaced. Name in upper right hand corner of all pages. Staple (or paperclip) the essay in the upper left hand corner. Be sure to give your essay a title, and work to make the title engaging and accurate (not "A Paper about a Poem by Dickinson"). Always keep a photocopy of your essay (or a computer backup file) in a safe place in case your paper should get lost or misplaced.

Audience: Your audience is this class. You can assume, therefore, that your audience knows basically what you know about Dickinson, and you can assume your audience has read and thought about this particular poem. You don't need to use valuable space to repeat the obvious things: don't simply summarize or paraphrase the poem, and don't bother telling us that Dickinson was an American poet who lived in the nineteenth century, etc. You will be attempting to show a group of readers who are familiar with Dickinson how certain aspects of this poem that may not be readily apparent can--with close study--begin to reveal themselves as vital elements that illuminate the way the poems work.

Strategy: Begin with a clear statement of what you see to be the main thought the poem is working with, then show how Dickinson or Whitman complicates and explores this thought. Don't feel you have to work through the poem line by line; focus instead on the images, words, and lines that you find to be keys to understanding the poem. Lead your reader through the process you underwent of coming to grips with the difficulties of the poem. Begin by immersing yourself in the poetry. Read the poem again and again, and read it out loud. Develop a feel for the language. Really listen to the poem, to its rhythms, repetitions, insistences, odd jumps, internal rhymes, surprising connections. Memorize key lines and images so that you can live with them for a few days. Look up words and etymologies; fill the margins around the poem with notes. Sometimes it helps to paraphrase the poem, to write out a kind of "translation," but this should be for your own use and not become part of your essay. In fact, it is precisely the difference between your paraphrase of the poem and the poem itself that you want your essay to focus on--the things that the poem does and says that never quite get into your paraphrase. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about the poem before you write anything; think by writing. Writing is slow-motion thinking. Try out ideas. Write lots of thoughts on paper, no matter how unformed or silly they may initially seem. Then cull through your notes and choose the most compelling ideas; focus on them. Develop the promising ideas. Drop the ideas that seem far-fetched or that make you feel you are forcing the poem into a shape and meaning that it seems to resist: look for the ideas that enhance the poem instead of coerce it. Keep in mind that, in an essay this brief, you can't do everything. Don't try to do an exhaustive reading. Be selective. Work closely and carefully with the language of the poem, the choice of words, the surprising breaks and twists of syntax, the rhythms and the rhymes and the repetitions. Get to know your poem well enough that it becomes experience more than "message." Then work to describe the experience effectively, so that your reader can experience the poem with you. Focus on the aspects of the poem that initially confuse you. You will write a better essay if you work from confusion to clarity than if you begin with things you think you understand; you need to feel a challenge in the language in order to initiate the energy of discovery. Always proofread your final copy carefully; leave time to edit out careless errors before the essay gets to your readers, where those errors will distract from and undermine the force of your argument.

HELP:

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: Dickinson's description of "Recess--in the ring" indicates that she associates childhood with happiness.

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 or dash, you can end it with a period so that your own sentence comes to closure. Example: Dickinson uses the "d" sound twice to indicate the increasingly deadening nature of the journey: "The Dews drew quivering and chill."

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: Dickinson uses images of nature to suggest the closing cycle of a human life:

If you leave material out of the quotation, use ellipses (. . .) to indicate to your reader that there is more there.
Example: Dickinson reminds us that "The Carriage held . . . Immortality."

If you quote a passage that cuts across two or more lines of poetry, indicate the line break with a slash (/).
Example: Dickinson tells us that she "put away / My labor and my leisure."

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 poem number from Dickinson's Complete Poems in parentheses.
Example: Dickinson portrays death as a lover in other poems as well, as when she calls him "the supple Suitor" (#1445).

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. Use critics only to get your argument going: do not simply paraphrase or mimic a critic's reading of the poem. Be sure you've struggled with the poem on your own before reading what others have to say: that way, you will have a foundation from which to argue with other views. Don't forget that you have Habegger's biography as a useful resource to fill in information about Dickinson's life that may help you support your arguments about the poem. For general useful advice about writing about poetry, go to Resources page and check the links under general sites, or use the links here for good sites about how to go about reading a poem, how to incorporate quotations into your essay, and how to write about literature:

How to read poetry: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/ReadingPoetry.html

How to quote and cite literary works: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/QuoLiterature.html

Advice about writing essays about literature: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/tchg/lit/adv/lit.papers.html