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Write an essay of three or four pages that responds to one of the following prompts. Choose authors and works included on the syllabus. Essays will be evaluated on clarity, focus, originality, and engagement with the text. Use MLA format and include a reference page if you use outside sources. Submit your essay as a Word, PDF, or plain text file.
Choose one poet and analyze several of their works. Where do the poems talk to each other? How are they similar, both in theme and in style? How does reading multiple works by the same author together change our perspective as readers?
Find a relevant primary source, like a painting, film, or historical document, or a secondary source, like a critical analysis or documentary, and discuss how it can inform or enrich our analysis of a particular poem or a poet’s body of work. How do these connections change our reading of the work?
Identify a poem or poet and discuss how they or their work engages with some specific aspect of gender or sexuality. Analyze whether and how the work reflects or challenges dominant cultural values. How does reading a work in this way deepen or change our understanding?
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Possible authors and works
Thomas Wyatt:
“Whoso List to Hunt”
“My Galley”
“They Flee from Me”
“My Lute Awake!”
Queen Elizabeth I:
“When I Was Fair and Young”
William Shakespeare:
Sonnets:
1 (“From fairest creatures we desire increase”)
18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)
20 (“A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted”)**
29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”)
73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)
97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been”)
116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)
129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”)
130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”)
John Donne:
“The Good-Morrow”
“Woman’s Constancy”
“The Anniversary”
“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
“The Flea”
“Elegy XIX. To His Mistress Going to Bed”
Holy Sonnets:
10 (“Death, be not proud, though some have called
thee”)
14 (“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You”)
Ezra Pound:
“In a Station of the Metro”
William Carlos Williams:
“This is Just to Say”
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
T.S. Eliot:
“The Waste Land”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Wilfred Owen:
“Dulce et Decorum Est”
“Anthem for Doomed Youth”
Siegfried Sassoon:
“Everyone Sang”
“The Rear-Guard”
Gertrude Stein:
“Susie Asado”
Adrienne Rich:
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
“Snapshots of a Daughter in Law”
“Diving into the Wreck”
Sylvia Plath:
“The Colossus”
“Lady Lazarus”
“Tulips”
“Ariel”
“Daddy”
Audre Lorde:
“Coal”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42577/coal
“Power”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53918/power-56d233adafeb3
Margaret Atwood:
“you fit into me”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151653/you-fit-into-me
William Blake
“The Lamb”
“Holy Thursday”
“The Tiger”
William Wordsworth
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
“The World is Too Much With Us”
George Gordon, Lord Byron
“Don Juan”
“She Walks in Beauty”
John Keats
“When I have Fears”
“Ode to a Nightingale”
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
“Bright Star”