Poetic Form Essay
 
Assignment

We are reading a number of odes and dramatic monologues, enough that you should develop a clear sense of both forms and the variations poets have practiced on them. Your task in this essay is to explore another example of one of these forms. Your purpose should be to improve your readers’ understanding of the work. Remember, however, that poetry in many ways lies beyond paraphrase. A poem is how it says what it says as much as it is what it says. You must therefore explore the how of the work you have chosen, not just the what. Poets do not write merely to make a point; essayists do that better, or at least more clearly. They write poetry because poetry has more ways of affecting the reader, and thus more power to do so. You need to examine the ways the poet accomplishes this task and what makes the particular poem you are writing about an effective example of the form.

In order to guide you through the process of this essay, you will submit a tentative thesis and several proposed quotations from the poem, along with explanations of how you plan to use them, well before the essay is due. This will allow you to receive feedback from me prior to submitting your work for a grade.
 
Guidelines

To write an effective paper of this kind, you need a strong thesis, rigorous argumentation, and carefully chosen support.

The thesis should unite theme and poetic technique — what the poem says and how the poet says it — in some way. You absolutely cannot make your focus a broadly qualitative judgment. No one needs to be told that these are great poems.

The paper may be either open- or closed-form; literary essays lend themselves to an open-form approach but either form can be effective. (See the description and examples of open-form and closed-form linked from the “Resources” page if you do not know what these are.) Either way, you should have an introduction to the paper in which you establish either the issue you are exploring (open-form), or the issue and your thesis (closed-form). You should not quote the work in your first paragraph. The conclusion of your paper either states and develops the thesis while connecting it to the claims you have made so far (open-form), or it briefly re-connects the thesis to the points the essay has made without repeating them fully, and ideally makes one further point (especially if the essay is closed-form) to make the reader glad you didn’t end one paragraph earlier. Just as you should not quote in your first paragraph, you should also not be quoting and analyzing the poem in your conclusion. If you could swap the positions of your introductory and concluding paragraphs, and they would still make sense, your conclusion is poor.

You should assume your readers have a college-level vocabulary and own a dictionary. Thus you do not have to define words, unless the meaning the poet intends is other than the usual one. The phrase “Webster’s Dictionary defines” does not belong in a college-level essay.

You should also assume your readers are familiar with the poem’s form, whether elegy or dramatic monologue. Therefore, do not both explaining that odes are poems of praise or tribute, or that dramatic monologues are poems written in the voice of a character rather than the poet’s own voice.

To support your ideas, your primary source must be the text itself. You should quote it frequently. However, these works are all too long to quote in their entirety. Therefore, you must be selective. Choose your quotations with your thesis in mind. Quote only enough of any passage so that you can support your point effectively. A good general rule is that if you quote it, you need to comment on it. If you quote six lines but only comment on the last two, something is wrong. Of course, the quotation needs to make sense out-of-context, but in general students begin by quoting too much, or quoting in too big chunks. That said, you should probably quote the poem at least once in every paragraph except for the introduction and conclusion.

Once you have identified the best lines to use for support, you need both to set them up and comment on them so that they support the thesis. Your general approach should be to establish the point you are trying to make — not the whole thesis, but a point that supports it — then introduce a quotation (and introduce means setting it up in a meaningful way, not just starting a paragraph with “Then Keats writes”), quote accurately, and then explain how the quotation supports the statement. You must both introduce the quotations and comment on them; as a result, you absolutely cannot either begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. Remember: the quotations cannot make your argument for you; you need to comment on everything you quote. The listserv posts have been opportunities to practice this.

Do not automatically quote only whole lines of poetry. Sometimes starting or ending your quotation in the middle of a line is necessary in order for the quotation to make sense. However, again you must be careful that your quotations make sense out of context, or that you set them up in a way that makes the meaning clear. Quotations of a single word or merely a two- or three-word phrase are almost never useful.

You may not use secondary sources for this assignment. That means no research. I am not interested in your ability to look up what someone else thinks of a poem. I am only interested in your ability to read closely and discerningly and argue persuasively. Using outside sources for this essay would be a violation of the Honor Code.

You must quote and cite the poem properly according to MLA format. See the Quotations and Citations Guidelines and your writer’s handbook for help with formatting quotations and citations.

Follow the Format Rules for the document.
 
Choice of Works

You may choose either of two possible due dates for this assignment, and for each you have a choice of poems:

Option 1: Odes by Keats. Preparatory work due 13 February; essay due 28 February

As your readings have demonstrated, Keats believes in the value of intensity and paradox. To explicate these poems effectively, you must consider not only what its theme is, but how Keats uses his mastery of poetic language to convey that theme. You have two choices of odes:

“To Autumn” — This is the shortest of the great odes, the last Keats wrote (in September of 1819), and according to many critics it is the most perfectly realized of all of them, as well as one of the greatest poems in the English language.

“Ode on Indolence” — This is the only one of Keats’s odes not published in his 1820 volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. In fact, it did not appear until decades after his death. Since then, its critical reputation has varied. Initially, most critics saw it as a lesser work, but over time its reputation has improved, and now the consensus is that it at least should be considered as belonging among them, if not quite the equal of “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.”

Option 2, Dramatic Monologues by Browning. Preparatory work due 20 February; essay due 6 March.

With Browning’s dramatic monologues, you must remember that his speakers are his own literary creations, even on those occasions when he bases them on real people. Your choices include five poems of varying lengths. The longer the poem, the more it gives you to work with, but also the more selective you must be. Shorter poems are less daunting, but they require that you examine virtually everything.

Do not write about the speaker in a Browning poem as if he is an independent entity; as we have discussed, Browning always uses his speakers to convey points he wants to make, even when he intends to be critical of the speaker’s character or point of view. I have seen essays about Browning poems that only mention Browning in the introduction and conclusion, and throughout the body of the essay discuss the speaker as if he is the one in control of the poem; that is a mistake. In all but one of these cases (“Andrea del Sarto”), the speaker is either fictional or anonymous, which should make it easier to remember that dramatic monologues are always acts of literary ventriloquism.

“The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church, Rome, 15—” — This comparatively early poem combines Browning’s skill at creating characters who indict themselves even as they try to justify or rationalize their actions with his fascination with theology. Note that the speaker here is dying and does not always speak logically or in complete sentences.

“Andrea del Sarto (called ‘The Faultless Painter’)” — This is another of Browning’s so-called painter poems, like “Fra Lippo Lippi.” As with that poem, Browning got the facts of Andrea’s life from Vasari’s Lives of the Artist, and that book is not always reliable, but that hardly matters. Browning uses this dramatic monologue to explore deeper themes: the difference between greatness in art as defined by technical skill and greatness as defined by inspired genius; whether suffering is necessary to the artistic process in order to create great art; the conflict between artistic ambition and a desire for a happy life. Andrea reflects on all these issues while addressing his unfaithful wife.

“Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha” — Like several other Browning poems, this dramatic monologue (one of Browning’s more comic poems) concerns music and employs a number of musical metaphors and references. Note that Master Hugues is not the speaker; instead, the poem is the complaint of a thoroughly annoyed anonymous organist forced to play Hugues’s difficult compositions.

“A Grammarian’s Funeral” — Another Browning poem set during the Renaissance, but instead of dealing with a painter, Browning instead considers the life of a scholar. The Renaissance happened in part because Europe recovered classical texts from Greek and Roman times. Your reading in Manguel told you some of this. Partly this was through the influence of the Islamic world on Europe (especially when Spain was re-conquered) and partly through the painstaking efforts of scholars to recover the understanding of classical languages. The deceased grammarian was one of these men. The speaker is one of his students.

“Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island” — In this longer dramatic monologue, Browning uses Shakespeare’s Caliban from The Tempest as his speaker. Caliban discourses upon the nature of his deity, Setebos, whom he imagines to be as cruel and brutal as himself. Browning’s real subject (as his subtitle reflects) is the 19th century idea of natural theology, which is basically the idea that one can infer the presence and nature of God by observation of the Creation, or nature, including human nature. Caliban deriving his idea of Setebos from his own nature is analogous, for Browning, to human beings deriving their idea of a deity from themselves. Caliban, however, intuits the existence of something beyond Setebos that he calls the Quiet, a spirit without cruelty, emotion, or even personality.
 
Preparatory Work

By midnight on the appropriate day, send me a Word document including

1) a tentative thesis statement (not just a topic but an actual thesis)
2) three properly formatted and cited quotations from the poem that you plan to use in your essay, which may be in-text or block quotations, but do not quote more than six lines in any one quotation, and each quotation must help you support one specific point
3) one or two sentences for each of the quotations explaining what specific point you believe that quotation will help you support (obviously this point must have some connection to the essay’s thesis).

Note: Do not send this to me as a simple e-mail; an e-mail does not allow me to see the formatting for quotations. Please note that in the essay itself you should use more than three quotations. The point of submitting three in the preparatory work is to demonstrate you are taking the right approach.
 
Essay Due

The due date varies according to the option chosen as shown above. Please send your essay as a Word document (with the doc or docx file extension) to me directly by midnight on the day it is due. Send it directly to me, not to the listserv.
 
Length
1250-1500 words of your own writing. Note that the word count should not include quotations, the Works Cited, the title and header, nor any other means of artificially extending the essay’s apparent length. The actual length will be longer (typically 1350-1800 words) due to all the quotations, which need to be plentiful. Use the Word Count function to calculate the count with and without quotations (but please leave out the header and Work Cited) and put the results at the bottom of the paper.
 
Evaluation

The quality of your understanding of and insights into the work and your use of quotations to support your ideas will determine your Content score. This score can be raised or lowered by the quality of your writing, including. your organization, grammar, style, concision, and adherence to the rules of citation and format. The Content Score (presuming the essay is of the proper length and responds to the assignment) can range from F (59) to A+ (100). The Style score can range from +3 (not just grammatically correct but concise and stylistically graceful) to -10 (extensive and varied problems). See the Style Score Guide for further explanation.

Following all the instructions on the preparatory work will earn you a 5 point bonus on the final grade. Failing to follow the instructions will earn you a smaller bonus, or no bonus at all. Failing to submit the preparatory work on time will result in a 10 point penalty to the essay’s final grade, and deny you the opportunity for my feedback on your ideas.
 
Sample Essay
Here is an essay from several years back on a poem that is not an option this time, “Another Elegy” by Margaret Atwood. This copy also includes the comments and corrections I sent back to the student. (The exact formula I use to calculate the style score has changed slightly since then, so the style modifier might be slightly different now.)