Audience Every writing situation involves persuasion: you need to convince you

Audience

Every writing situation involves persuasion: you need to convince your reader that your position is valid and that your argument is compelling. The first step in convincing your reader is to think about your reader: who is my audience and what do they value?

I (the professor) am your target audience for this first assignment. You should assume that I have a basic knowledge of the poem, that I am familiar with the formal devices used in poetry, and that I am looking for an interpretation that says something new and interesting about the poem.

Creating Rhetorical Exigence

Create a “problem” in your introduction. Early on you need to sell your reader on the importance of your topic, and doing so usually entails creating a problem, a question that your essay will answer. You can’t do that by opening with lines like: “Throughout history poetry has been important in society”; or “My Sister’s Jeans” is a really interesting poem that I enjoyed reading.” Believe it or not, many students do open with these types of mundane sentences, and I react to them as you would react: So what? What’s new or thought provoking about these points? A better strategy is to begin by focusing on ambiguities or points of uncertainty in the text itself. One way to do that is to jot down questions you had while reading the work. For example, Why does the author keep returning to ___ image or ___ metaphor throughout the poem? Who is the speaker of the poem? How is he or she different from the implied author? What types of formal devices are used and how do they relate to the content? Use these questions as a starting point for locating aspects of the work that are unclear, uncertain, troubling, or thought provoking. Then, write an introduction that highlights these points of ambiguity.

Formulating an Argument: Some Common Pitfalls

When constructing your argument about the poem, the first thing you need to remember is that argument does not mean summary. Although it might be necessary to remind your reader of what happens in a poem—especially if the poem is obscure—too much summary will quickly turn a promising essay into a poor one. That’s because the job of a literary critic is to add his or her own insights about the poem, to say something new or interesting about the poem. It is not to recount what happens in the poem.

The second thing you need to remember is that not all arguments are the same. An argument about a poem that simply identifies a theme or that says something obvious does not add to our understanding. A good way to avoid this pitfall is to focus on an aspect of the poem that isn’t clear to you—some question, which you had when reading the poem, that doesn’t have an immediately obvious answer.

Formulating an Argument in Three Parts

Once you’ve identified a good question, you need to come up with a good answer. And this involves creating a thoughtful argument about the poem. Here are three easy steps to follow that will help you generate a good, thoughtful argument:

1. Identify the poem’s moral statement (see Eagleton for more details), which is distinct from the poem’s topic or subject. The subject is simply what the poem is about in a narrow sense: a snowy wood, the poet’s father, an old person’s memory, a field of daffodils, etc. The moral statement, by contrast, is the poet’s (usually implicit) assertion that this topic has some meaning, that it’s valuable, that it says something about human existence. Thus, a poet in writing about a snowy wood might use that subject as an occasion for thinking about death, while another might use a field of daffodils to explore the sustaining power of beautiful memories.

2. Once you’ve identified the poem’s moral statement (and, remember, poems can have more than one), you’ll have a fuller understanding of what the poem is about—not just the topic but the significance of the topic. The next step is to shift your focus from what the poem says to how the poem says it. This is a crucial move. If you simply write about what the poem says, even if you have a deep understanding of the work’s moral statement, you aren’t engaging in literary analysis. To simply address what a poem says is akin to an art critic focusing only on what a painting depicts, not on how the painter depicts her subject (through light, shading, composition, etc). Shifting to how in poetry analysis means considering the poem’s formal elements, everything from rhythm and alliteration to metaphor and tone.

3. Now that you have a good understanding of the poem’s moral statement and of how it is communicated, you need to do one more thing: evaluate the moral statement, the form, and the connection between the two. That’s another way of saying: think critically about the poem. Sometimes this can mean commenting more fully on the relationship between form and content, a type of aesthetic response to the poem: “By adopting an ironic tone, in his meditation on death, the poet creates a sense of ambiguity. He seems, on one hand, to fear death—the snowy wood where he might ‘sleep’—but he also seems to long for the end, the sleepy comfort of the grave.” Sometimes, though, it can mean talking about the poem’s political implications (usually in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality): “By using a snowy wood to symbolize a boundary between life and death, this supposed nature poem actually reinforces capitalist assumptions about private property and the commodification of land.” Obviously, you don’t need to limit yourself to an aesthetic or political response. There are many other ways to reflect critically on a poem: the point is simply that you need to take a stand—you need to provide your own insights—on what the poem says and how it says it.

Combining these three steps together will enable you to formulate a good argument about the poem.

Supporting Your Argument

At this point, you’ll have asked a good question about the poem, and you’ll have created a smart central argument. The final step is to prove that argument through close analysis of specific lines in the poem. At a basic level, this means support what you say with quotations from the poem. If, for example, you argue that the poet’s use of irony creates ambiguity, quote the lines that display irony and ambiguity. If you believe the snowy wood in a poem symbolizes a boundary between life and death, quote the words that suggest this boundary. If you believe that rhythm is especially important in a certain line, quote the line and place accents on the syllables.

Quoting lines, though, is only the first part of good close analysis. The second thing that you need to do is analyze the lines. That is, discuss the lines in light of your argument. If your central argument is a good one, you’ll be able to demonstrate that the lines on the page can be read in ways that are interesting, thought-provoking, and not immediately obvious. What you’re doing, in other words, is showing your reader how exactly your thesis helps us to interpret the poem in new ways. If, by contrast, your quotations illustrate your argument without requiring any commentary, you probably have created a simplistic central claim. If so, revise your argument until it helps you to generate new ways of reading the words on the page.

One final point: when we talk about poetry, we use specialized language. The formal elements in poems have specific names—many of which are defined in the back of Eagleton’s book. It is extremely important that you employ this specialized language. To see why, consider the following analogy: imagine you’re in a biology class, and your professor tried to teach you how to understand the workings of the digestive system without using any specific names to define the various organs. That would be a pretty lame class. The same is true of any discussion of poetry that doesn’t use specialized language. Thus, don’t say how the lines have a nice “flow”; talk about the “iambic meter” or the author’s use of “assonance.” Don’t say that the first line seems deliberately unclear. Say that the “grammatical subject” has two possible “verbs,” which creates a sense of “ambiguity.” Don’t say that the person sounds angry even though his words are nice. Say that the “speaker’s tone” is at odds with the “diction.” We could go on with this, but you get the point: good close reading relies upon the specialized terms of poetic analysis. Bad close reading talks in vague terms and relies upon non-specialized language. For examples of good close reading, look at the final chapter in Eagleton.

A Word on Sources

Remember what I said on the first day of class. I will assume that all of the words and ideas in the essay are your own. In general, it is best to avoid outside sources that provide pre-packaged readings of specific poems. Thus, steer clear of places like SparkNotes, as their readings are usually simplistic and obvious. If, however, you need to look up specific references in a poem, that’s perfectly fine. Just be sure to cite your sources. If, for some reason, you want to incorporate language from an outside source, be sure to place that language in quotation marks and cite your source. Borrowing ideas or language without proper attribution constitutes plagiarism.

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