Tips for Writing Essays About Poetry

Writing Analytically about Literature: The Basics

• Assume your audience has read and understood the works of literature. You do not need to summarize the events of the entire work, though brief reminders of the events directly surrounding the sections you are quoting may be appropriate.

• Literary critics write about events in literature in present tense.

So if I’m not summarizing… what am I supposed to say in my essay?

• Because you are assuming your audience has already read the literature, your job is to point out things about the work(s) that your audience may not have noticed or thought about.

• This may include analysis/close reading of the literature, comparisons of relevant sections of two or more works and discussion of those comparisons’ significance, or (in later essays) discussion of other critics’ reaction to the work.

Literary Analysis and Tone• The tone of a literary analysis is expected to be academic and

professional. Most literary critics maintain a certain distance from the works they write about. This means that they avoid the extremes of gushing about the work on one hand and raging angrily about it on the other. (Remember, it is not your job to judge whether or not a work is good/bad or moral/immoral. Your job is to analyze and explain the literary elements of the work(s). If you really hate a work THAT MUCH, don’t write about it.)

• Severely limit the use of first person pronouns. In rare cases, including personal experience may be appropriate in an intro or conclusion, but in general, leave “I” and “me” out of the body of your essay. (Also, there is no need to tell the story of how you chose your subject. Since you are writing about the works, I’m going to assume that you found something of interest in them.)

Textbook/Website Resources

• Chapter 1, “Reading and Writing About Literature,” is on p. 2, and the section on writing starts on p. 6.

• Two example student papers can be found beginning on p. 22.

• Chapter 2, “Writing Literary Arguments,” is on p. 36, an another example essay is on p. 44.

• Check the course website for additional resources about how to write about poetry and do a close reading. Close reading is a skill that will be useful to you as you prepare to write Essay #2.

Using Quotes to Support Your Claim

• In earlier classes, you probably learned that when you write an essay, you make a claim and support it with evidence.

• The same is true for essays about literature. The difference is, the claim you are making is about the literature, and the evidence you support it with comes from the literature itself, along with your explanation of the evidence you chose.

When Quoting Poetry….

• You can quote several lines together, a single line, or a few words, whichever suits your purpose best.

• HOWEVER, you need to make sure that you do not pull quotes out of context.

• Example of a quote out of context: • Matthew Arnold celebrates the beauty of creation

when he writes in “Dover Beach” that the world is “So various, so beautiful, so new” (line 32). (This poem is on p. 677-678.)

• What is wrong with the quote use above?

MLA Format for Quotes from Poems

• If all of the words in your quote come from a single line, MLA format requires that you follow the quotation with the word “line” and the line number in parentheses after the quote the first time you use it, and just the line numbers each time after that.

• Example of using quotes from a single line: • In “Ozymandias,” Shelley creates irony by placing words

with connotations of grandeur and words with connotations of destruction near one another. The statue’s legs are both “vast and trunkless” (line 2), and near the end of the poem it is described as a “colossal wreck” (14).

MLA Format for Quotes from Poems

• Example of using two or three lines: • The speaker of “Traveling through the Dark” shows

an almost uncomfortable awareness of his place in the natural world when he says, “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; / around our group I could hear the wilderness listen” (lines 15-16).

• See p. 58 for textbook example of in-text citation. • See p. 62 for textbook example of works cited for a

poem in an anthology.