First Essay

English 2001 First Paper Assignment
For your first paper, I want you to explore one of the poems listed on the second page. Your “exploration” should focus on some issue raised by the poem, or some question you might ask about the poem, that seems to you to be both interesting and complicated. It isn’t sufficiently interesting to choose randomly three metaphors in a poem (without explaining what is significant about the three metaphors) and explore what each of them might mean because there’s no obvious reason that someone who’s read the poem would care about the metaphors that are your focus. It isn’t sufficiently complicated (to choose an absurd example) to answer a question about how many times conjunctions are used within a poem – no reader of a poem would ever care about the answer to such a question, and thus even a successful answer to the question would strike any reader of yourpaper as pointless.

How do you decide if an issue or question is worth exploring? The easiest way is to think about the kinds of issues or questions that the poem might raise for any informed reader of the poem, and then decide whether you can explore one of these issues or questions in a way that an informed reader might find persuasive. Your goal should not be to “prove” whatever you want to say about the poem. Rather, your goal should be to present your ideas in a way that is persuasive, which means (at the least) doing three things.

First, you must show how and why your specific points are connected to each other and help to develop the overall focus or argument of your paper.

Second, you must provide evidence for the claims that you are making, which means looking closely at how the words in the poem have led you to the claims that you are making. (Looking closely at the words can obviously include exploring how such things as tone, meter, and figural language enter into your claims about how the words of the poem should be understood.)

Third, you must quote frequently from the poem to support the claims that you are making, and you must show how and why the passages that you quote provide such support.

Two sample papers in your text – on John Donne [pp. 824-826] and on Emily Dickinson [pp. 861-863] – are good models for how to quote from poetry. I’ve posted three sample papers in the Course Information module on Canvas, as well asa file that explains the rules for, and gives examples of, quoting from poetry. You should also look at the document “Some Do’s and Don’ts for Your Essay” that’s posted in the Course Information module.

The paper should be 1600 to 1700 words in length, and should be typed and double-spaced. The due date for the paper is Monday, October 12. The paper should be submitted to Canvas.

Your paper must be about one of these poems:
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (pp. 726-727)
Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night” (p. 711)
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” (p. 591)
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (pp. 660-661)
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits” p. 601)
Luisa Lopez, “Junior Year Abroad” (pp. 1006-1007)
Elaine Magarrel, “The Joy of Cooking” (pp. 707-708)
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (pp. 647-648)
Sharon Olds, “Last Night” (pp. 650-651)
Jim Stevens, “Schizophrenia” (pp. 703-704)

English 2001 Some Do’s and Don’ts forYour Essay

1. Don’t begin your paper with general statements that don’t have a specific connection to whatever the focus of your paper is going to be. Here’s an example of such a general statement: “In the modern world, there is considerable disagreement about what love is.”

2. Don’t end your paragraphs with a sentence whose only purpose is to announce whatever the focus of the next paragraph will be.

3. Don’t end your paper by simply restating things that you’ve already said.

4. Don’t make statements that undermine the persuasiveness of your own argument. Examples would be saying something like “everyone has their own opinion about this,” or “all interpretation is subjective,” or “in my opinion.”

5. You don’t have to have a thesis sentence, but you can certainly include a thesis sentence if you find it useful.

6. The focus of your paper needs to be the poem, and not yourself. If you say something like “these words make me feel…” or “this is my favorite part of the poem,” then you are writing about yourself, and not about the poem.

7. Keep in mind that the audience for your paper (and this is true for all college writing) is an “informed reader.” What this means is that the reader of your paper knows, among other things, when the poem was written and what the poem is about, so these aren’t things that you need to include in your paper.

8. You don’t need to talk about everything in the poem, nor does the development of your discussion need to be based upon the progression of the poem.

9. Use the term “the speaker” rather than the author’s name to characterize who is saying the words of the poem. (Say “the speaker expresses joy…” rather than “Keats expresses joy…”) But you don’t need to use “the speaker” as a basis for everything you discuss. For example, you could say “the speaker’s feeling of ‘love’ is complicated by its relationship to his fear of ‘chronic anger.’” But you could also say “the feeling of ‘love’ is complicated by its relationship to a fear of ‘chronic anger.’”

10. A speaker isn’t like a character in a novel. Don’t talk about whether the speaker is or is not making the correct choices, or whether the speaker should have thought differently or acted differently.

11. Don’t argue that the poem expresses feelings or describes situations that we all can understand or relate to. Unless the issue is raised by the poem itself, there’s no reason to address whether the poem is expressing feelings or describing situations that are familiar. (When such issues are raised in poems, the reason is usually to complicate or challenge our understanding of familiar feelings or situations.)

12. Don’t be afraid to take some chances with the paper. A paper that hasn’t quite figured out how to connect complicated ideas is always better than a paper that succeeds in completely connecting simple ideas. Keep in mind that you have as a safety net the opportunity to rewrite your paper after it’s graded and returned to you.