Due Tuesday, Nov 8 - class time.

This essay will be a very short evaluation of a poem. If you sometimes read movie or music reviews, you could think of this as a capsule review. It serves as a warm-up for your thesis paper. It gives me the chance to see more formal writing than what you've shared in Teams or Perusall. But it also gives you a chance to get comfortable with my evaluative criteria (Content, Organization, Mechanics.) I'll use the same basic framework for your Thesis Paper, except that we'll have time for multiple drafts and so you will also get graded on Revision then.

You will 1) refer to a literary example; 2) draw on a critical source and 3) make an evaluative claim.

Your goal is to show that you can make a persuasive case for the value you would assign to a work based on your reading of it but supported by the criteria you share with a critic (Barbara Herrnstein Smith or Terry Eagleton).

Your essay should include just two sources: a poet and a critic.

Choose any modernist or postmodern work we have looked at (William Carlos Williams, from Week 1; Rupi Kaur poem; John Cage mesostic; Duchamp poem; or any other piece from the The Blind Man).

Consider what you learned from one of the two critics we studied that could help you make a case for the value of the work. (You do not have to argue it is a timeless masterpiece. You can argue it is an ambitious failure, or an trivial success. You could consider that is succeeds as a Romantic poem but not as a Modernist one. You can argue that it conveys something of beauty but only for a certain audience, evokes emotion but does not make use of literary form, etc. )

To keep this assignment very simple, I'm going to ask you to write just three well developed paragraphs (350 words max).

1. Intro: Paragraph one - introduce the poem you will discuss. Give an overview, summary or characterization of its topic, style, etc. Make clear the author's name and smoothly incorporate a brief quotation.
2. Criteria: Paragraph two - outline the approach to evaluating the piece which you are taking, with specific reference to either Smith or Eagleton. In other words, you must define what things most count for you, in this essay, evaluating this poem with the support of a critical source. You should either paraphrase or quote briefly from the critic.
3. Application: Paragraph three - explain your judgement of the poem based on the criteria above. Aim to persuade your reader. You might quote selectively here too.

Gallery of Poems

Use simple MLA format for the essay, and cite your sources using your preferred in-text citation method (MLA, APA, etc.)