Connections A Hypertext Resource for Literature

Poetry Analysis Paper

To be fully complete, the first version of the paper you submit will have these components:

  1. It will include a completed poetry paper submission sheet that documents all of the following elements. (The link to the submission sheet takes you to a template file. If you open it, you should be able to fill it out and save your own copy. Let me know if you have any trouble.)

  2. It will include basic heading information: a title, your name, my name, and the course (English 120).
    • Please double-space your essay, but other decisions--the font, whether to use a title page, and so forth--are up to you. If you have any questions about formatting, feel free to ask in class or pop me an email.

  3. It will consist of 800 to 1000 words of your writing. (Using LLMs/generative AI is not permitted at any stage of the writing process.)

  4. It will undertake a close reading of one (and only one) of the poems we have read for class.
    • You will choose the poem and the approach you want to take to reading the poem.
    • The close reading will use at least five pieces of specific, quoted textual evidence from the poem. It may use other sources as well, but they are not required for this assignment.

  5. It will use Chicago NB style for its citations, which means that every citation of a source will have both a footnote and a citation in a bibliography at the end of the paper. Sources beyond the poem are not required for this paper, but if you do use sources, find them through the library's search resources and choose sources from 1990 or later. If you have a reason to use a source of another kind, check with me first.
    • Important note: take care with your quotations and sources! Citing a non-existent source or a quotation that you cannot trace is a violation of the College's policies on academic honesty and will require me, by College policy, to refer your assignment to the Committee on Academic Standing.

  6. It will reflect your best effort to write an analysis based on the Start Small, Start Strange descriptions of close reading, titles, the thesis, transitions, and quotation and citations.

If any of these basic elements of the paper are not complete, I will let you know, and you will then have one week to complete the initial assignment.

You do not need to execute all of those elements perfectly—on the contrary, our process of consultation and revision assumes that, as is true of all writing about complex topics, the first version of the paper will benefit from revision.

In our conference about the paper, we will identify two elements for you to concentrate on if you choose to do the extra version of the assignment.