When you are tasked with writing a poetry analysis essay you will have to discuss the details about how the language used in the poem contributes to the overall meaning of the poem. You will be graded more than likely on how well you can identify poetic devices such as meter and imagery as well as metaphor.
In addition, the exam will feature five “excerpts” from your work, which will be written as essays instead of poems. These excerpts can be used as the basis for your final essay, or it can be used to supplement your writing.
Each of the excerpts will be assigned a grade of 3 out of five, and these five excerpts provide important context to what you should know before finishing.
Finally, your final essay, on one of the five excerpts, will be evaluated in two parts. The first part will focus on the overall meaning and implications of the poem while the second will detail how you can further expand upon the poem via a further examination of its literary context.
These two parts allow you to examine your essay further, as well as how the poem has influenced your work. The latter two elements will be evaluated again on your CSCS essay on Monday 1 January – which may affect the rest of your coursework or even your academic career.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet #73, published in 1609, is written in the Shakespearean or English sonnet style. It consists of three quatrains and one couplet at the end, written in iambic pentameters. Each quatrain has its own rhyme scheme, rhyming in alternating lines. The couplet summarizes the preceding twelve lines. Sonnet 73 appears to contain multiple parallels … Read more
In choosing a poem from the English Romanticism era, I found one that particularly stands among others. A poem that had some depth, in that I couldnt understand and feel what the poem was expressing at first glance. It is a poem that had a sense of mystery around it. These characteristics are exceptionally evident … Read more
In all poems there is a theme, whether the theme be obvious from the start or it be one that is difficult to find. No matter how long or short a poem or how complicated or simple every poem that you read will have a theme. In “Beale Street Love” by Langston Hughes, the poem … Read more
Claude McKay “If We Must Die” One of the most influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance was Jamaican born Claude McKay, who was a political activist, a novelist, an essayist and a poet. Claude McKay was aware of how to keep his name consistently in mainstream culture by writing for that audience. Although in McKay’s … Read more
Robert Frost wrote the poem Home Burial after he and his wife suffered the tragic loss of their 4-year-old son. Home Burial shows the emotions people feel after such a loss, and how they face those emotions. Through Frost’s experience he shows that men and women grieve in different ways. In Home Burial Frost demonstrates, … Read more
Superficially, Anne Sexton’s poem Three Green Windows is an account of an old woman daydreaming an the verge of sleep. Upon looking deeper the reader realizes, through the use of general symbolism, the author portrayed the daydreams about a better life by a middle-aged woman, recalling the events of her past, and picturing what her … Read more
The greatest pain in life is not to die, but to be ignored. To lose the person you love so much to another who doesn’t care at all. To have someone you care so about so much throw a party… and not tell you about it. When your favorite person on earth neglects to invite … Read more
