Literature

“Out of our quarrel with others we make prose; out of our quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry,” wrote W. B. Yeats.  It is an interesting point that poems often do stage a debate within the poet over his or her own conflicting values and beliefs, or that poems by the same poet express conflicting values and beliefs.  But is also seems undeniable that poets engage in arguing with others, explicitly or implicitly.

For your research paper, discuss two poems about a quarrel within a poet, or a quarrel between one poet and another, or a quarrel between poets.  The quarrel may develop out of  traditional cultural or philosophical oppositions,  such as soul vs. body, spirit vs. matter, the ideal vs. the real, civilization vs. chaos, nature vs. nurture, eternity vs. time, the supernatural vs. the natural, the urban vs. the rural, art vs. nature, reason vs. passion, the individual vs. community, the ordinary vs. the extraordinary, hope vs. despair, consciousness vs. unconsciousness.In some poems, two or more of these oppositions may overlap.  For example, the entire body of Petrarchan and Post- (or Anti-) Petrarchan poetry may be said to form a prolonged debate between idealized and realistic views on love, with poets taking an array of positions on these two concepts.

Feel free as well to write about contemporary conflicts as well such as the conflict over masculinity vs. femininity or minority assimilation vs separatism.  You should analyze the poetic strategies by which the poet or poets explore these dualisms and possibly synthesize them.

You may choose any poems on our reading list from the semester, including poems you have already written about.  Your paper must, however, draw upon at least five secondary sources.   You can use Glossary of Literary Terms, library books, articles available through library databases such as Academic Search Premier and JSTOR, .edu sites, and some scholarly .org cites, such as Luminarium:  Anthology of English Literature. You may NOT use .com sources.  Use these sources to find ideas that can help develop your thesis or set up a “straw man,” someone you can argue against.

This essay, like Essays 1 and 2, requires a close reading of poems as a preparation, but does not ask you to provide thorough explication of the poems.   Rather, it is comparative and requires you to move between poems, discussing thoughtfully selected aspects of them that relate to your topic and thesis, bringing out similarities and differences within the two poems as you move along.   You will present not close readings but mid-distance readings, selecting key features for interpretation but not necessary analyzing every line.The poems must have something important in common, such as their author, subject, literary period, or genre (e.g., lyric, Renaissance love lyric, carpe diem poem, dramatic monologue, pastoral, etc.).

It is also important that you compare/contrast the poems to look at the poems that draw upon various expressive devices of language and poetic techniques to develop their arguments.

Petrarchan poems, for instance, depend heavily on metaphors to convey the idea of idealized love (the mistress as angel, her eyes as the sun, etc.) and paradoxes to express the Petrarch’s devotion to the mistress and his sorrow at her unattainability (“I freeze and burn”).  Their tone is invariably serious (no flippancy or irony), and their meter and rhymes form an invariable pattern to convey the poet’s emotional stasis.  Anti-Petrarchan poems may make use of similar and alternative techniques for establishing their position within a continuing debate.

Further discussion about comparison/contrast papers and a sample paper in the file “Sample Research Paper.”  We will discuss in class various means of organizing the paper.

Length:  Minimum 6 pages, plus Works Cited page

Value:  300 points, not 200 as indicated on the syllabus. There will be no final exam.

Due Dates:

T Nov 22: Proposal and Annotated Bibliography (2-3 pages). Follow the model of the Sample Bibliography on BB.  An electronic copy should be mailed to harnedj@uhd.edu and another copy uploaded to the file “PB Turnitin” in the course content section.

T Nov 29: Research Paper.  A electronic copy should be sent to harnedj@uhd.edu and another copy uploaded to RP Turnitin in the course content section of BB.